Semantic Web Approach to Ease Regulation Compliance Checking in Construction Industry

International audienceRegulations in the Building Industry are becoming increasingly complex and involve more than one technical area. They cover products, components and project implementations. They also play an important role to ensure the quality of a building, and to minimize its environmental impact. Control or compliance checking are becoming more complex every day for industrials but also for organizations in charge of assessing the conformity of new products or processes. This paper will detail the approach taken by the CSTB in order to simplify this compliance control task. The approach and the solutions proposed are based on semantic web technologies. For this purpose, we first elaborate a domain-ontology, which defines the main concepts involved and the relationships among them based on OWL. We rely on SBVR and SPARQL to reformulate the regulatory requirements written in natural language in a controlled and formal language. We structure then our control process based on expert practices. Each elementary control step is defined as a SPARQL query and assembled into complex control processes " on demand " according to the component tested and its semantic definition. Finally, we represent in RDF the association between the SBVR rules and SPARQL queries representing the same regulatory constraints