Formal Specification of the IFC Concept Structure for Precast Model Exchanges

The Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) provides a rich and redundant schema for interoperability. However, IFC lacks semantic clarity in mapping entities and relationships resulting in multiple methods to map the same information. This research explores a software engineering methodology based on engineering ontologies to develop a formal, consistent and machine-readable structure for IFC entities, attributes and relationships. Various issues such as the need for a logical framework, the current semantic approaches in AEC/FM and advantages of ontology for IFC are addressed. Details of the approach are illustrated by building application ontology for precast model exchanges. This research is expected to impact the overall interoperability of BIM tools by providing a formal and consistent taxonomy and classification structure for creating model view definitions (MVD) using IFC.