Abstract
Abstract. With the building models are getting increasingly complicated, the levels of collaboration across professionals attract more attention in the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry. In order to adapt the change, buildingSMART developed Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) to facilitate the interoperability between software platforms. However, IFC data are currently shared in the form of text file, which is defective. In this paper, considering the object-based inheritance hierarchy of IFC and the storage features of different database management systems (DBMS), we propose a novel object-relational storage model that uses Oracle database to store IFC data. Firstly, establish the mapping rules between data types in IFC specification and Oracle database. Secondly, design the IFC database according to the relationships among IFC entities. Thirdly, parse the IFC file and extract IFC data. And lastly, store IFC data into corresponding tables in IFC database. In experiment, three different building models are selected to demonstrate the effectiveness of our storage model. The comparison of experimental statistics proves that IFC data are lossless during data exchange.
Highlights
Construction projects are comprehensive and multistage activities which involve design, construction, operation management, supervision and even demolition
The widespread use of multimedia data and other complex structure data forces database management systems (DBMS) to support features associated with object-orientation, which developed into object-relational database management system (ORDBMS)
The reason is that the file exported from Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) database is generated by IFC Engine DLL, which has different file organizational rules with Revit
Summary
Construction projects are comprehensive and multistage activities which involve design, construction, operation management, supervision and even demolition. In this paper, we propose an object-relational IFC storage model based on Oracle database. 2.RELATED WORK Researches on improving the storage performance of IFC data had been carried out a long time before These studies proposed using databases to substitute the current file-based data management. 3.OBJECT-RELATIONAL IFC STORAGE SCHEMA 3.1 Mapping Rules IFC specification is defined with EXPRESS language, in which data types contain primitive, enumeration, selected and entity type. They do not properly support Oracle object-oriented features To solve this problem, Oracle developed a specialized data access interface called Oracle Call Interface (OCI), which acts as an "interpreter" between applications and the low-level database network protocol. Parse the IFC official specification and extract data types defined in IFC, and generate the IFC database based on the mapping rules (1).
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