Semantic BIM reasoner for the verification of IFC Models

: Recent years have witnessed the development of various techniques and tools for the building code-compliance of IFC models. Indeed these are great efforts, but, still there is a gap for the fully automatic building code-compliance. This paper presents our research and development of Semantic BIM Reasoner (SBIM-Reasoner) which employs semantic technologies to meet the requirements of semantic verification of an IFC model. SBIM-Reasoner employs several preprocessors (IFC to RDF converter, Geometry Extractor) to build the semantic repository from the input IFC model. Once all the triples are generated from the initial data (.ifc file), Stardog is used to build a knowledge graph for the semantic verification. All types of inference and reasoning mechanisms for the semantic verification are applied over this knowledge graph to meet the requirements of verification. Knowledge graph over triplets enables freedom of extending RDF based Semantic IFC model, creation of newer vocabulary and formation of newer rules, concatenation of triplets to build rules with condition and constraints over IFC data, dynamic reasoning over the triplets based on the initial data of IFC model, etc. Finally, we tested our prototype by using several online IFC models. We conclude that semantic technologies provide more rich mechanisms and answer vast types of queries for the verification of IFC models. It provides powerful features based on SPARQL libraries and serves best for the automated code compliance and verification of IFC models.