An opportunity analysis on the future role of BIMs in urban data management

Abstract

In order to facilitate some urban management tasks, information regarding buildings needs to be represented in form of geospatial information. Some tasks in urban management such as indoor navigation, emergency response management, and processes in the construction life cycle e.g. site selection can be facilitated through the use of certain and sometimes high amount of, geometric and semantic information about a building. A Building Information Model (BIM) can be defined as a semantically rich shared 3D digital building model. Recent research has demonstrated that geometric and semantic information from BIMs can be transferred into the geospatial environment and CAD/GIS/BIM information can be integrated at web services level. This paper presents a comparative opportunity analysis on the future role of BIMs in Urban Data Management. The analysis presented was focused on exploring, the impact of progression in Building Information Modeling research, to the opportunities provided by the use of BIMs in Urban Data Management context. or Building Information Modeling has been realized as a process of managing a project through a single shared information backbone. Recent research in the area also demonstrated how 4 to N dimensional simulation applications can be facilitated using BIMs (Rebolj et al., 2010; Spearpoint, 2010). Countries such as Singapore has used BIMs to validate that building models are compliant with national code and regulations. Research has also demonstrated that Building Information Modeling can facilitate the design of energy efficient buildings towards addressing sustainability and reduction in CO2 emissions issues (Solis & Mutis, 2010; Bee Hua, 2010). As stated in Isikdag & Zlatanova (2009) in order to effectively automate several urban management tasks, information regarding buildings needs to be represented in form of geospatial information. Several tasks of urban management such as, indoor navigation, emergency response management and some processes in the construction life cycle, like site selection (i.e. selection of the land plot for a designed project) can be facilitated through the use of certain and sometimes high amount of, geometric and semantic information about a building. Recent research efforts such as Isikdag (2006), OGC Web Services Phase 4 (OWS-4 Summary Document, 2007; Lapierre & Cote, 2008) and implementations in commercial software (i.e. IfcExplorer, 2008; Safe Software, 2009) have demonstrated that geometric and semantic information from BIMs can be transferred into the geospatial environment and CAD/GIS/BIM information can be integrated at web services level. In fact, as there are major differences in, geometric representation objects and semantics between the models in CAD/BIM and GIS domains, algorithms for seamless translation from BIMs into the geospatial environment are still in development. In the provided context, this paper presents an opportunity analysis focusing on the future role of BIMs in Urban Data Management. The comparative analysis explained here has been completed based on two studies, first study was Isikdag and Underwood (2010) which underlined the current research directions and trends of Building Information Modeling in light of a recent edited book in the field, and the second one (Isikdag & Zlatanova, 2009) was a SWOT analysis about the implementation of BIMs within the Geospatial Environment. The comparative analysis was carried out based on a matrix defined for evaluating the impact of Building Information Modeling research trends on the opportunities provided by the use of BIMs within the Geospatial Environment. The paper starts with a background section summarizing the findings of the two studies which forms the background for the comparative analysis. The following sections provide the details on the comparative analysis performed and discuss the findings of the analysis.