For the management or reorganisation of existing buildings, data concerning dimensions and construction are necessary. Often these data are given exclusively by paper-based drawings and no digital data such as a computer based product model or even a CAD-model are available. In order to perform mass calculation, damage mapping or a recalculation of the structure these drawings of the building under consideration have to be analysed manually by the engineer. This is a very time-consuming job. In order to close this gap between drawings of an existing building and a digital product model an approach is presented in this paper to digitise a drawing, to build up geometric and topologic models and to recognise construction parts of the building....