Abstract
In the construction industry, BIM is enabling the information sharing and integration practise culture to emerge. Consideration of the geo-location is essential at the design and planning stage for building construction. It is important to integrate BIM with surrounding geo-spatial information which will not only benefit the construction industry in getting site information, but also help urban management in getting building details in the city. This chapter reports the emerging efforts on BIM integration with geospatial information within the urban built environment. The authors have been working on the design and development of the integration framework of BIM and geospatial information. In this framework, a BIM web service, Building Feature Service (BFS), is defined to retrieve building objects and elements information based on OGC’s Web Service. This framework can extend the scope of BIM to the urban built environment to support life cycle information services for both city management and the construction industry.
TopBuilding Information Modelling can been seen as the latest generation of Computer Aided Design (CAD) systems in which all of the intelligent building objects that make up a building design can coexist in a single ‘project database’ or ‘virtual building’. A Building Information Model (BIM) provides a single, logical, consistent source for all information associated with the building (Howell 2003). To extend the scope from building scale into the wide urban built environment, it is essential to consider the relevant geospatial information in the context of the urban built environment.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Building Information Model (BIM): is digital data model of graphical, physical and functional characteristics of buildings. Construction and management of buildings and building-elements involves many stakeholders. The complexity of BIM data model is believed to add necessary simplicity for the sharing and management of information over the entire lifecycle of a building.
Geography Markup language (GML): A mark-up language based on XML. GML schema definition is developed by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and becomes an ISO standard. GML can be used to define spatial objects (features) with their geometry, attributes and relations and is intended to be an open format for the exchange of geospatial features between systems.
Building Feature Service (BFS): A BIM based Web feature service. Information of a building object and its elements is retrieved and provided to users through OGC Web Service. The BFS uses XML as exchange format between client and the BFS server, which have detailed building and element descriptions. BFS is seen as an approach to bridge BIM and the urban built environment to support life cycle information services for both city management and the construction industry.
Geospatial Information System (GIS): An information system, which allows storing, managing, reorganizing, visualizing and analysing geographical data. GIS is a ’smart’ digital map system. A major aspect of a GIS is the ability to execute queries on the data that normally includes a spatial or location aspect.
CityGML: extended GML schema is also an XML-based format for the representation, storage and exchange of virtual 3D city models. CityGML models geo-referenced 3D vector data and the semantics associated with the data. It is also extensible to further enrich the data. CityGML has been adopted as an official OGC Standard from its version of 1.0.
Mediating Integration System: A specific client/server architecture system, in such a system, a mediating service module is designed to bridge the data source layer and client application layer. The idea is to make better system architecture in terms of its modularity. Mediating integration systems are more flexible and extensible than a normal client/server system. In this chapter, the mediating service module responses to the client request, retrieves building features from the BFS and sends combined results to the client.
OWS: OGC Web Service includes WMS, WFS, W3DS, WCS - the OGC web services are defined in order to provide open standard interfaces in order to exchange geospatial data between systems. The various services provided fulfil specific tasks: one of the most prominent ones is the Web Map Service that can be used to query map data (images) from a server. The Web Feature Service, for example provides ‘raw’ geospatial features that can be analysed, converted and used for other purposes than map display. Because the definitions are publicly available, they can be used to link systems and are a popular way to generate ‘geospatial mash-ups’.
Web Service: Taking the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)’s definition, a Web service is a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. It has an interface described in a machine-processable format (specifically WSDL). Other systems interact with the Web service in a manner prescribed by its description using SOAP-messages, typically conveyed using HTTP with an XML serialization in conjunction with other Web-related standards.
CAD: Computer Aided Design