Long-term lifecycle-related management of digital building documents: towards a holistic and standard-based concept for a technical and organizational solution in building authorities

The long-term lifecycle-related management of digital building information is essential to improve the overall quality of public built assets. However, this management task still poses great challenges for building authorities, as they are usually responsible for large, heterogeneous and long-lived built assets with countless of data sets and documents that are increasingly changing from analogue to digital representations. These digital collections are characterized by complex dependencies, by numerous different, sometimes highly specialized and proprietary formats and also by their inappropriate organization. The major challenge is to ensure completeness, consistency and usability over the entire lifecycle of buildings or their associated digital data and documents. In this paper, we present an approach for a holistic and standard-based concept for a technical and organizational solution in building authorities. Holistic means integrating concepts for the long-term usability of digital building information, taking into account the framework conditions described in building authorities, including the introduction of BIM (building information modeling). To this end, we outline how the concepts of the consolidated and widely accepted ISO-standardized reference model OAIS (open archive information system) can be applied to a building-specific information architecture. First, we sketch the history of electronic data processing in the building sector and introduce the essential concepts of OAIS. Then, we illustrate typical major actors and their (future) IT systems, including systems intended for OAIS-compliant long-term usability. Next, we outline major (future) software components and their interactions and assignment to lifecycle phases. Finally, we delineate how the generic information model of OAIS can be used. In summary, ensuring the long-term usability of digital information in the building sector will remain a grand challenge, but our proposed approach to the systematic application and further refinement of the OAIS reference model can help to better organize future discussions as well as research, development and implementation activities. We conclude with some suggestions for further research based on the concepts of the OAIS reference model, such as refining information models or developing information repositories needed for long-term interpretation of digital objects.