Methodologies for requirement checking on building models

The use of Building Information Modelling (BIM) has increased in the Architectural and Urban domain. Stakeholders within distinct disciplines collaborate and exchange such information models digitally. In order to strive for an interoperable use of the models, requirement documents are being written by stakeholders, standardisation bodies and governments. Such documents pose additional requirements to the exchange of building model definitions and limit the scope of information to something that is relevant to the disciplines the exchange pertains to, the phase of the construction project and the level of development of the project. For effective collaboration processes, checking these requirements in an automated and unambiguous way is of crucial importance. Yet, requirement definitions often comprise natural language texts and academic and commercial tools being developed in this regard are fragmented and heterogeneous. Furthermore, the models being checked are of uncertain quality because the semantics of the schema are not rigorously formalized and enforced and models contain redundancies that affect their reliability. This paper urges for more developed schema semantics and illustrates how the body of technical means, such as classification system, concept libraries, query languages, reasoners and model view definitions are related to one another and to the concept of automated rule checking.