Ontology Engineering Method for Integrating Building Models

Abstract

The Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) and City Geography Markup Language (CityGML) are the two most prominent semantic models for the representation of Building Information Models (BIM) and geospatial objects. IFC and CityGML use different terminologies to describe the same domain, and there is a great heterogeneity in their semantics. For bidirectional conversions between these models, an intermediate Unified Building Model (UBM) is proposed that facilitates the transfer of spatial information from IFC to CityGML and vice versa. A unified model in the current study is defined as a superset model that is extended to contain all the features and objects from both IFC and CityGML building models. The conversion is a two-steps process in which a model is first converted to the unified model and then to the target model.