Integrating building-level and campus-level data

• Main Author: Wei, Lan
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2013
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/45144

Integrating building design data (in the form of Building Information Models - BIMs) and 3D City Models is a promising solution to retrieving both detailed building information and exploring the relationships among building components and buildings in a city area. It could also help to facilitate decision making in building facility management and maintenance operations. Among other challenges, performing such an integration is difficult because BIMs and 3D city models vary in both semantic and geometric representations. Our first attempt was to try to convert the BIM into the city model, but the results were very disappointing. It is infeasible to convert every necessary component in the BIM into the city model, and the converted files cannot be visualized by the current city model applications. Next, we implemented a data integration system to incorporate information from both models. We used a novel approach to apply arithmetic expressions to express the overlapping information, not only for the semantic representation, but also on the geometric representation of the building components. This approach improved query answering on components from both models. Finally, we describe future challenges that will be needed to improve the accuracy of our current approach.