BIM on the way to IFC5 - alignment and development of IFC semantics and ontologies with UML and OWL for road and rail structures, bridges, tunnels, ports, and waterways

Abstract

The article discusses the development and standardization of BIM. The standardization of BIM itself today goes through the formalization of semantic and ontological relationships between elements of buildings, structures, and transport infrastructures and begins to almost coincide with the extensions and alignments of standards developed by buildingSMART, known as IFC. There is undoubtedly a gap in the exchange of information between the geospatial and construction fields, well understood in transport practice. The reason for this is that geospatial systems and engineering surveys have not yet been harmonized and integrated with building information modeling (BIM) and therefore do not allow for widespread implementation of significant cost and time savings. This gap for the structures of roads and railways, bridges, tunnels, ports, and waterways consists in the absence of an unambiguous interpretation of concepts and semantic links in the ontological domains of BIM and GIS and is the subject of efforts and plans of buildingSMART and its partners. By ensuring the implementation and development of BIM (IFC) for transport infrastructures in Russia, it is possible to provide a basis for their coordinated, economically sound, and time-saving creation and development in the life cycle, in line with or even surpassing the best world practices.