Innovative solutions for rapid and intelligent survey and assessment methods are required in maintenance, repair, retrofit and rebuild of enormous numbers of bridges in service throughout the world. Motivated by this need, a next-generation integrated bridge inspection system, called SeeBridge, has been proposed. An Information Delivery Manual (IDM) was compiled to specify the technical components, activities and information exchanges in the SeeBridge process, and a Model View Definition (MVD) was prepared to specify the data exchange schema to serve the IDM. The MVD was bound to the IFC4 Add2 data schema standard. The IDM and MVD support research and development of the system by rigorously defining the information and data that structure bridge engineers' knowledge. The SeeBridge process is mapped, parts of the data repositories are presented, and the future use of the IDM is discussed. The development underlines the real potential for automated inspection of infrastructure at large, because it demonstrates that the hurdles in the way of automated acquisition of detailed and semantically rich models of existing infrastructure are computational in nature, not instrumental, and are surmountable with existing technologies.

Semantic enrichment of building models adds meaningful domain-specific or application-specific information to a digital building model. It is applicable to solving interoperability problems and to compilation of models from point cloud data. The SeeBIM (Semantic Enrichment Engine for BIM) prototype software encapsulates domain expert knowledge in computer readable rules for inference of object types, identity and aggregation of systems. However, it is limited to axis-aligned bounding box geometry and the adequacy of its rule-sets cannot be guaranteed. This paper solves these drawbacks by (1) devising a new procedure for compiling inference rule sets that are known a priori to be adequate for complete and thorough classification of model objects, and (2) enhancing the operators to compute complex geometry and enable precise topological rule processing. The procedure for compiling adequate rule sets is illustrated using a synthetic concrete highway bridge model. A real-world highway bridge model, with 333 components of 13 different types and compiled from a laser scanned point cloud, is used to validate the approach and test the enhanced SeeBIM system. All of the elements are classified correctly, demonstrating the efficacy of the approach to semantic enrichment.

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Background: With the rising adoption of Building Information Modeling (BIM) in the AEC sector, computational models supersede traditional ways of information provision based on textual documents and two-dimensional drawings. The use of models enables the streamlining of workflows, and the included virtual construction increases the quality of the final product, the building. To create a comprehensive description of a planned building, information from different sources must be combined, specified and regularly updated by the project's stakeholders. The emerging models are highly structured, and instance files entail large amounts of data. However, in an unprocessed state, these models are of limited suitability for performing engineering tasks as the amount and structure does not match the domain-specific and purpose-oriented views. Methods: Selection and filtering data for the user's needs is a well-understood task in computer science, and various approaches are available. A promising approach is the usage of formal query languages. In this paper, selected common query languages are examined and assessed for processing building model information. Based on the analysis, we come to the conclusion that textual query languages are too complex to be employed by typical end users in the construction industry such as architects and engineers. Results: To overcome this issue, two Visual Programming Languages representing a new, more intuitive mechanism for data retrieval are introduced. The first one, QL4BIM, is designed for general filtering of IFC models, the second one, VCCL, has been developed for Code Compliance Checking. Both languages provide operators based on the Relational Algebra to allow handling of relations -a highly required feature of BIM QLs. Conclusions: The paper concludes with a discussion of the strengths and limitations of visual programming languages in the BIM context.