A Web-platform for Linking IFC to External Information during the Entire Lifecycle of a Building

AbstractDuring the lifecycle of a building, much more information is used and produced than can be contained inside a Building Information Model (BIM). The information outside the BIM is seldom connected to the BIM or connected across domains. Furthermore, information in BIM is only accessible to people with sufficient CAD or architectural background, and often expensive software is needed to edit and add data. This inefficient information management causes significant costs in practice. Our research contributes to the development of IFC based web applications in practice and demonstrates a way of linking machine to human readable data thus making the data accessible to non CAD users or architectural experts. In this paper we describe such a platform for the integration of model-based data and non-model based data. We tried to construct a mapping process from IFC properties to a national building element classification system, as a way of structuring the objects and information for use in our web platform. Since both the structure of IFC and most building element classification systems are based on semantic relations of building elements (i.e. holonym, meronym, hypernym), translations by means of a basic reasoning system should be feasible. We elaborate on several uses of this platform in applications for maintenance and reuse of building materials, buildings and built structures