Integration of BIM-related bridge information in an ontological knowledgebase
Al-Hakam Hamdan, Raimar J. Scherer
Abstract
Currently, utilizing digital representations of bridge constructions is still limited to geometry-based models with none or only little semantic data. Consequently, assessing these models requires the interpretation of external sources, e.g. relational databases or reports. Despite new approaches in the Building Information Modeling (BIM) domain such as the IFC-Bridge extension for the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) try to provide models where geometric and semantic data are combined, a great proportion of information from current and future domains that are relevant for the bridge industry are not covered. For this reason, an extensible web ontology inspired from the Building Topology On-tology (BOT) for buildings has been developed, which functions as a core ontol-ogy for bridge representations and therefore covers all necessary general information used in this domain. The developed core ontology is interlinked with multiple domain specific bridge extensions in a bridge ontology framework that is applied on a test scenario. In this paper, the components of the bridge ontology framework are explained as well as the application on the test case. In addition, ontology alignments for BOT and ifcOWL are proposed as well as shapes for ontology validation. Furthermore, the functionality of a developed software prototype is described that generates the bridge ontology from a given IFC model.