BIMTag: Semantic annotation of web BIM product resources based on IFC ontology

With the rapid popularization of BIM technologies, BIM resources such as building product libraries are growing rapidly on the web. However, these numerous resources are usually from heterogeneous systems or various manufacturers, possibly with ambiguous expressions and unclear relationships for product descriptions, which do not effectively support information retrieval. Inspired by the Semantic Web techniques, this paper presents a new semantic annotation method for web BIM product resources based on IFC ontology. First, a domain-specific ontology is built to represent the knowledge in AEC for semantic annotation, which mainly utilizes the concepts and relationships defined in the IFC schema. Then with reference to the ontology, an automatic concept annotation method is proposed to annotate web BIM resources. A prototype system, named BIMTag, is developed and applied to a search engine for demonstrating the utility and effectiveness of our method.

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