Several tasks in urban and architectural design are today undertaken in a geospatial context. Building Information Models (BIM) and geospatial technologies offer 3D data models that provide information about buildings and the surrounding environment. The Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) and CityGML are today the two most prominent semantic models for representation of BIM and geospatial models respectively. CityGML has emerged as a standard for modeling city models while IFC has been developed as a reference model for building objects and sites. Current CAD and geospatial software provide tools that allow the conversion of information from one format to the other. These tools are however fairly limited in their capabilities, often resulting in data and information losses in the transformations. This paper describes a new approach for data integration based on a unified building model (UBM) which encapsulates both the CityGML and IFC models, thus avoiding translations between the models and loss of information. To build the UBM, all classes and related concepts were initially collected from both models, overlapping concepts were merged, new objects were created to ensure the capturing of both indoor and outdoor objects, and finally, spatial relationships between the objects were redefined. Unified Modeling Language (UML) notations were used for representing its objects and relationships between them. There are two use-case scenarios, both set in a hospital: "evacuation" and "allocating spaces for patient wards" were developed to validate and test the proposed UBM data model. Based on these two scenarios, four validation queries were defined in order to validate the appropriateness of the proposed unified building model. It has been validated, through the case scenarios and four queries, that the UBM being developed is able to integrate CityGML data as well as IFC data in an apparently seamless way. Constraints and enrichment functions are used for populating empty database tables and fields. The motivation scenarios also show the needs and benefits of having an integrated approach to the modeling of indoor and outdoor spatial features.

Abstract-Interoperability between building information models (BIM) and geographic information models has a strong potential to bring benefit to different demands in construction analysis, urban planning, homeland security and other applications. Therefore, different research and commercial efforts have been initiated to integrate the most prominent semantic models in BIM and geospatial applications. These semantic models are the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) and City Geography Markup Language (CityGML) respectively. However, these efforts mainly: a) use a unidirectional approach (mostly from IFC to CityGML) for converting data, or b) Extending CityGML by conceptual requirements for converting CityGML to IFC models. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the potential of unidirectional conversion between IFC and CityGML. The different IFC concepts and its corresponding concepts in CityGML is studied and evaluated. The investigation goes beyond building objects, also including other concepts that are represented implicitly in building schemas such as building objects relations, hierarchies of building objects, appearance and other building characteristics. Due to the large semantic differences between IFC and CityGML standards, the schema mapping is based on a manual pragmatic approach without automatic procedures. The mappings are classified into three categories, namely 'full matching', 'partial matching' and 'no matching'. The result of the study shows that only a few concepts are classified as 'direct matching', a few as well as 'no matching' while most of the building concepts are classified as 'partial matching'. It is concluded that unidirectional approaches cannot translate all the needed concepts from both IFC and CityGML standards. Instead, we propose a meta-based unified building model, based on both standards, which shows a high potential for overcoming the shortages of the unidirectional conversion approaches.

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3D City models have so far neglected utility networks in built environments, both interior and exterior. Many urban applications, e.g. emergency response or maintenance operations, are looking for such an integration of interior and exterior utility. Interior utility is usually created and maintained using Building Information Model (BIM) systems, while exterior utility is stored, managed and analyzed using GIS. Researchers have suggested that the best approach for BIM/GIS integration is harmonized semantics, which allow formal mapping between the BIM and real world GIS. This paper provides preliminary ideas and directions for how to acquire information from BIM/Industry Foundation Class (IFC) and map it to CityGML utility network Application Domain Extension (ADE). The investigation points out that, in most cases, there is a direct one-to-one mapping between IFC schema and UtilityNetworkADE schema, and only in one case there is one-to-many mapping; related to logical connectivity since there is no exact concept to represent the case in UtilityNetworkADE. Many examples are shown of partial IFC files and their possible translation in order to be represented in UtilityNetworkADE classes.

Abstract:Finding a method to evaluate people's emotional responses to urban spaces in a valid and objective way is fundamentally important for urban design practices and related policy making. Analysis of the essential qualities of urban space could be made both more effective and more accurate using innovative information techniques that have become available in the era of big data. This study introduces an integrated method based on geographical information systems (GIS) and an emotion-tracking technique to quantify the relationship between people's emotional responses and urban space. This method can evaluate the degree to which people's emotional responses are influenced by multiple urban characteristics such as building shapes and textures, isovist parameters, visual entropy, and visual fractals. The results indicate that urban spaces may influence people's emotional responses through both spatial sequence arrangements and shifting scenario sequences. Emotional data were collected with body sensors and GPS devices. Spatial clustering was detected to target effective sampling locations; then, isovists were generated to extract building textures. Logistic regression and a receiver operating characteristic analysis were used to determine the key isovist parameters and the probabilities that they influenced people's emotion. Finally, based on the results, we make some suggestions for design professionals in the field of urban space optimization.

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This paper presents two complementary methods: an approach to compute a network data-set for indoor space of a building by using its two-dimensional (2D) floor plans and limited semantic information, combined with an optimal crowd evacuation method. The approach includes three steps: (1) generate critical points in the space, (2) connect neighbour points to build up the network, and then (3) run the optimal algorithm for optimal crowd evacuation from a room to the exit gates of the building. Triangulated Irregular Network (TIN) is used in the first two steps. The optimal evacuation crowd is not based on the nearest evacuation gate for a person but relies on optimal sorting of the waiting lists at each gate of the room to be evacuated. As an example case, a rectangular room with 52 persons with two gates is evacuated in 102 elementary interval times (one interval corresponds to the time for one step for normal velocity walking), whereas it would have been evacuated in not less than 167 elementary steps. The procedure for generating the customized network involves the use of 2D floor plans of a building and some common Geographic Information System (GIS) functions. This method combined with the optimal sorting lists will be helpful for guiding crowd evacuation during any emergency.

The described study aims to find correlations between urban spatial configurations and human emotions. To this end, the authors measured people's emotions while they walk along a path in an urban area using an instrument that measures skin conductance and skin temperature. The corresponding locations of the test persons were measured recorded by using a GPS-tracker (n=13). The results are interpreted and categorized as measures for positive and negative emotional arousal. To evaluate the technical and methodological process. The test results offer initial evidence that certain spaces or spatial sequences do cause positive or negative emotional arousal while others are relatively neutral. To achieve the goal of the study, the outcome was used as a basis for the study of testing correlations between people's emotional responses and urban spatial configurations represented by Isovist properties of the urban form. By using their model the authors can explain negative emotional arousal for certain places, but they couldn't find a model to predict emotional responses for individual spatial configurations.