What is EXPRESS-X

In the near future Building Information Modelling will be applied in different areas of the AEC industry. Building Information Models (BIMs) will be used as resources to enable interoperability of software and ‘Building Information Modelling’ based Integrated Project Delivery will be realised as a common process of managing a project over a single shared information backbone. Thus, facilitating the collaborative use of shared BIMs is becoming important in parallel with the industrial demand in the field. Some urban management tasks such as disaster management, delivery of goods and services, and cityscape visualisation are managed by using Geospatial Information Systems as the current state-of-art, as the tasks in these processes require a high level and volume of integrated geospatial information. Several of these tasks such as fire response management require detailed geometric and semantic information about buildings in the form of geospatial information, while tasks such as visualisation of the urban fabric might require less (geometric and semantic) information. Today service-oriented architectures are becoming more popular in terms of enabling integration and collaboration over distributed environments. In this context, this short chapter presents an enhancement for a BIM Web Service pattern (i.e. RESTful BIM) that will help in facilitating information transfer from Building Information Models into the geospatial environment. The chapter starts with the background section later provides a review on the RESTful BIM pattern. Geospatial Views that can be developed for the RESTFul BIM will be elaborated on later in the chapter.