Abstract
Interoperability between building information models (BIM) and geographic information models has a strong potential to bring benefit to different demands in construction analysis, urban planning, homeland security and other applications. Therefore, different research and commercial efforts have been initiated to integrate the most prominent semantic models in BIM and geospatial applications. These semantic models are the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) and City Geography Markup Language (CityGML) respectively. However, these efforts mainly: a) use a unidirectional approach (mostly from IFC to CityGML) for converting data, or b) Extending CityGML by conceptual requirements for converting CityGML to IFC models. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the potential of unidirectional conversion between IFC and CityGML. The different IFC concepts and its corresponding concepts in CityGML is studied and evaluated. The investigation goes beyond building objects, also including other concepts that are represented implicitly in building schemas such as building objects relations, hierarchies of building objects, appearance and other building characteristics. Due to the large semantic differences between IFC and CityGML standards, the schema mapping is based on a manual pragmatic approach without automatic procedures. The mappings are classified into three categories, namely ‘full matching’, ‘partial matching’ and ‘no matching’. The result of the study shows that only a few concepts are classified as ‘direct matching’, a few as well as ‘no matching’ while most of the building concepts are classified as ‘partial matching’. It is concluded that unidirectional approaches cannot translate all the needed concepts from both IFC and CityGML standards. Instead, we propose a meta-based unified building model, based on both standards, which shows a high potential for overcoming the shortages of the unidirectional conversion approaches.
Highlights
Sharing and exchanging spatial information in various disciplines has been a major driving force behind the development of spatial technology and applications in the last decade (Isikdag and Zlatanova, 2009b). 3D city modeling applications is one of the most important products of this development
With its implementation as an application schema for Geography Markup Language 3 (GML3), City Geography Markup Language (CityGML) is considered more appropriate for outdoor modeling in different levels of detail (Kolbe and Gröger, 2004)
This paper aims to investigate the potential of unidirectional conversion between Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) and CityGML
Summary
Sharing and exchanging spatial information in various disciplines has been a major driving force behind the development of spatial technology and applications in the last decade (Isikdag and Zlatanova, 2009b). 3D city modeling applications is one of the most important products of this development. With its implementation as an application schema for Geography Markup Language 3 (GML3), CityGML is considered more appropriate for outdoor modeling in different levels of detail (Kolbe and Gröger, 2004) Considering their ability for modeling spatial objects with respect to entities and geometric and non-spatial characteristics, IFC and CityGML are seen today as the two most prominent semantic models for representation of design and real world city objects (Isikdag and Zlatanova, 2009b). Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) IFC is defined as an object oriented specification for exchanging, sharing and re-using information throughout the building industry’s life-cycle It has been initially developed since 1996 by the International Alliance for Interoperability (IAI) and it is still under ongoing process of development by different stockholders (IAI, 2008). A wide area of AEC/FM domains (such as architectural design, engineering, building analysis, HVAC, energy simulation, thermal analysis, maintenance and cost estimation) are covered by IFC compliance software vendors (IAI, 2011; Lapierre and Cote, 2008)
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