An Improved Approach for Effective Describing Geometric Data in ifcOWL through WKT High Order Expressions

Abstract

Building Information Models (BIM) are considered as building digital representations, including comprehensive geometric and non-geometric information. For improving BIM interoperability, the semantic related technologies have been the one of main approaches for processing BIM data. Currently, ifcOWL is a recommended Web Ontology Language (OWL) representation of the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) schema. When BIM geometric data is translated into ifcOWL representations standardized by buildingSMART, the excessive number of triples will be produced, and the generated Resource Description Framework (RDF) file will also be extremely bigger than the IFC original file. For generating concise geometric representation in Semantic Web context, Well-known text (WKT) has been widely used to describe BIM geometry data in ifcOWL. However, to avoid losing semantic information, only some simple pre-existing WKT expressions (Point or LineString) are used for describing BIM geometric aggregated data in semantics context. For solving this issue, we propose an improved approach that can represent BIM geometric data in ifcOWL ontology through WKT high order expressions. This representation can not only take full advantage of pre-existing WKT expressions to generate a more concise RDF representation, but also reduce the loss the semantic information.