Integrating Ireland's Geospatial Information to Provide Authoritative Building Information Models

Abstract

Building Information Modelling (BIM) is a key enabler to support integration of building data within the buildings life cycle and is an important aspect to support a wide range of use cases, related to building navigation, control, sustainability, etc. Open BIM faces several challenges related to standardization, data interdependency, data access, and security. In addition to these technical challenges, there remains the barrier among BIM developers who wish to protect their intellectual property, as full 3D BIM development requires expertise and effort. This means that there is often limited availability of BIM models. In Ireland, the Ordnance Survey Ireland (OSi) has a substantial dataset which includes not only GIS data (polygon footprint, geodetic coordinate), but also additional building specific data (form and function). In this paper we demonstrate the use of an applied and tested methodology for uplifting GIS data (relational data) into RDF (GeoSPARQL and OSi ontology) and demonstrate how this data is used for interlinking to other building data with an initial, simple exploratory example, taken from DBpedia. By interlinking building data and making it available, new insights about buildings in Ireland can be made, currently not possible due to lack of availability of data. This is an important step towards the iterative integration of ever more complex BIM models into the wider web of data to support the aforementioned use cases.