Publishing authoritative geospatial data to support interlinking of building information models

Abstract

Building Information Modelling (BIM) is a key enabler to support integration of building data within the buildings life cycle (BLC) and is an important aspect to support a wide range of use cases, related to intelligent automation, navigation, energy efficiency, sustainability and so forth. Open building data 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 building data. However, a Linked Data approach to BIM, combined with a supporting national geospatial identifier infrastructure makes interlinking and controlled sharing of BIM models possible. In Ireland, the Ordnance Survey Ireland (OSi) maintains a substantial data set, called Prime2, which includes not only building GIS data (polygon footprint, geodetic coordinate), but also additional building specific data (e.g. form, function and status). The data set also includes change information, recording when changes took place and who captured and validated those changes. This paper presents the development of a national geospatial identifier infrastructure based on an OSi building ontology that supports capturing OSi building data using Resource Description Framework (RDF). The paper details the different steps required to generate the ontology and publish the data. First, an initial analysis of the data set to generate the ontology is discussed. This includes identification of mappings to existing standards, e.g. GeoSPARQL to handle geometries and PROV-O to handle provenance, to the development of R2RML mappings to generate the RDF and the method for deploying the ontology and the building graphs. This data is then made available dependent on different licensing agreements handled by an access control approach. Methods are then presented to support the interlinking of the authoritative data with other building data standards and data sets using geolocation, followed finally by discussion and future work.