Whole Life Cycle Construction Information Flow using Semantic Web Technologies: A Case for Infrastructure Projects

Abstract

The construction industry is considered to be lagging behind other industries in terms of the technological advancement. One of the main factors is the lack of integration of incoherent and heterogeneous data on a project level. Whilst the adoption of Building Information Modelling (BIM) technologies and processes was aimed to solve integration issues. The interoperability is still a problem to solve, as most information and data fields show inconsistencies in a number of cases. One of the aspects of the problem is that IFC EXPRESS schema is only machine readable, requires extensive mappings, and usually does not support infrastructure domains other than buildings. This research explores the possibility of utilising Semantic Web Technologies (SWT) to help achieving some of the desired goals of data interoperability and Whole Life Cycle (WLC) information flow. SWT support the creation of comprehensive, layered, shared, human and machines readable, and extendable knowledge repositories dubbed ontologies. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) which forms the core of SWT provides a rather elegant way of modelling datasets, that is, assigning an Internationalised Resource Identifier (IRI) to each class, instance, and property. SWT are ought to provide better information retrieval and inferencing than current systems used in the industry. The main objective of this paper is to present a framework to demonstrate how SWT can underpin WLC information flow in water infrastructure projects case study.