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D5.1 State-of-the-art review of advancements and challenges in ontology research
Abstract
This document, Deliverable 5.1 "State-of-the-art review of advancements and challenges in ontology research" aims at defining the future directions of development work in Streamer in regard to Building Information Modelling (BIM) and Geographic Information System (GIS) information model usages in hospital design. The state-of-the-art review focusses on (1) the technology advances in the area of information management, leading to modern data schemas for BIM and GIS, the next generation ontologies following semantic web technology, and IT tools that can be used by developers and well-informed users to create and access such ontologies. And (2) it highlights the scenarios and data-flow needs arising from the Streamer hospital use cases.
The conclusions are based on a medium term view on developments reaching to novel, but still practical results within a two to three year time frame. The main recommendations are:
- Focus is on quality of BIM and GIS data for supporting the assessment of quantifiable key performance in-dicators, such as energy efficiency, efficient space layout, or best match of the client’s programme of re-quirements.
- Key factors are checkable BIM and GIS submissions that can be validated against the stated information requirements and applicable codes (for usability, permits, or best practice).
- Explicit definitions of information requirements identify the necessary information content needed to per-form several tasks (such as energy simulation) or checks (such as accessibility rules),
- The best option is the hybrid use of existing BIM and GIS tools, standards and formats, enhanced by for-mal representations of information requirements and open definition of checkable rules, with novel solu-tions deriving from semantic web technologies, to encode more complex knowledge and codes.
Those recommendations are confirmed by the results of the state-of-the-art in ontological research, information management and collaboration support, and toolset available for developers and users. Latest developments in semantic web technology and linked open data approaches are seen as being suitable to enhance and comple-ment an information management/collaboration support based on open standards, in particular IFC and CityGML. Also these standards shall be further enhanced by an additional layer that enables quality checks of data de-scribed by these formats. Here the formal specification of Model View Definitions (MVD) has been identified as an important intermediate step leading to mvdXML that allows for checking IFC-based BIM submissions against the stated information requirements.
The objectives for further work in Streamer in the direction outlined by the recommendations are (1) improve BIM and GIS information management, including work flow specific exchanges, data requirement definitions, and quality checks, (2) interlink various information sources, including references to linked open data on the web, and (3) encode additional knowledge for more comprehensive code checking and better parameterization of design solutions.
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