Ontology-based Web services framework for Building Information Modeling

The construction industry is known for being fragmented, yet a construction project is a multi-disciplinary team effort which requires information from many different stakeholders of various domains. Effective information exchange is of great importance to a project's success. Currently existing paper-based information exchange methods between different parties in the construction industry are not efficient, especially in the context of delivering construction information to the construction jobsite. The application of Building Information Modeling (BIM) is seeing great acceptance in the construction industry, and the problem of how to push the application of BIM to the jobsite is a field that needs more research.;This dissertation proposes a framework build on the Web services model for applying BIM to the jobsite. The Web services framework is built on an ontology developed on Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) and a partial IFC model extraction algorithm using that ontology. With the framework, only a partial model extracted from the complete model needs to be transferred via the network. The framework also supports textual information inquiry on the model. All the functions, including 3D model presentation, can be carried in a Web browser. The architecture and implementation of both a core service and an assistant service are discussed in detail. The proposed framework can be easily expanded as long as the same Web services interface and the common ontology are observed. Different use cases were used to demonstrate and validated the framework. Once implemented, the framework can be utilized by other IFC-supported BIM applications, as well as jobsite workers without extensive knowledge of BIM and IFC, for precise and consistent project information retrieval on the construction jobsite.