Shepherding Metadata Through the Building Lifecycle

Many different digital representations of a building are produced over the course of its lifecycle. These representations contain the metadata required to support different stages of the building, from initial planning and design, to construction and commissioning, through operations, audits, retrofits and maintenance. However, because of differences in the semantics, structure and syntax of these representations, the metadata they contain is not interoperable. We present a novel method for leveraging these representations to create a unified, authoritative Brick metadata model for a building that can be continually maintained over the course of the building lifecycle. A simple synchronization protocol relays inferred Brick metadata from existing metadata sources such as gbXML, BuildingSync, Project Haystack and Modelica to a central integration server, which merges the metadata into a valid Brick model.

[1]  Graham Wood,et al.  Taxonomy for BIM and Asset Management Semantic Interoperability , 2018, Journal of Management in Engineering.

[2]  Maŕıa Poveda-Villalón,et al.  Extending the SAREF ontology for building devices and topology ? , 2018 .

[3]  David E. Culler,et al.  Beyond a House of Sticks: Formalizing Metadata Tags with Brick , 2019, BuildSys@SenSys.

[4]  Bing Liu,et al.  U.S. Department of Energy Commercial Reference Building Models of the National Building Stock , 2011 .

[5]  David E. Culler,et al.  Design and analysis of a query processor for brick , 2017, BuildSys@SenSys.

[6]  K. P. Lam,et al.  A comparative study of the IFC and gbXML informational infrastructures for data exchange in computational design support environments , 2007 .

[7]  Thierry S. Nouidui,et al.  Modelica Buildings library , 2014 .

[8]  Jianjun Hu,et al.  Control Description Language , 2019, Proceedings of The American Modelica Conference 2018, October 9-10, Somberg Conference Center, Cambridge MA, USA.

[9]  Andreas Harth,et al.  Rule-based Programming of User Agents for Linked Data , 2018, LDOW@WWW.

[10]  William E. Winkler,et al.  The State of Record Linkage and Current Research Problems , 1999 .

[11]  Pardis Pishdad-Bozorgi,et al.  BIM assisted Building Automation System information exchange using BACnet and IFC , 2020 .

[12]  Y. Zhang,et al.  Semantic interoperability in building design: Methods and tools , 2006, Comput. Aided Des..

[13]  Julian J. McAuley,et al.  Scrabble: transferrable semi-automated semantic metadata normalization using intermediate representation , 2018, BuildSys@SenSys.

[14]  Vlado Stankovski,et al.  Architecture of an open knowledge base for sustainable buildings based on Linked Data technologies , 2013 .

[15]  Pieter Pauwels,et al.  EXPRESS to OWL for construction industry: Towards a recommendable and usable ifcOWL ontology , 2016 .

[16]  Mani Srivastava,et al.  Brick: Towards a Unified Metadata Schema For Buildings , 2016, BuildSys@SenSys.

[17]  Therese Peffer,et al.  Mortar: an open testbed for portable building analytics , 2018, BuildSys@SenSys.

[18]  A. Azzouz.  2011 , 2020, City.

[19]  Pieter Pauwels,et al.  BOT: The building topology ontology of the W3C linked building data group , 2020, Semantic Web.

[20]  Mikkel Baun Kjærgaard,et al.  Evaluation of the opportunities and limitations of using IFC models as source of building metadata , 2018, BuildSys@SenSys.

[21]  David E. Culler,et al.  Automated Metadata Construction to Support Portable Building Applications , 2015, BuildSys@SenSys.

[22]  Carl T. Haas,et al.  State of research in automatic as-built modelling , 2015, Adv. Eng. Informatics.

[23]  Jennifer Widom,et al.  The TSIMMIS Approach to Mediation: Data Models and Languages , 1997, Journal of Intelligent Information Systems.

[24]  Michael R. Genesereth,et al.  The Conceptual Basis for Mediation Services , 1997, IEEE Expert.