IFC-graph for facilitating building information access and query

Abstract

This study attempts to address a challenge regarding the extraction of building information, which is one of the fundamental tasks that needs to be addressed in the construction domain. Current technologies, such as relational databases, have difficulty in efficiently and effectively managing and querying the interconnected building information with full of hidden relationships. To address this problem, this study adopted the graph-theory-based graph database technology to reveal hidden relationships within building information. A model-driven approach was developed to enable a full conversion of Industry Foundation Classes data into labeled property graph, which is referred to as IFC-Graph. The result shows that IFC-Graph can represent interconnected building information and reveal hidden relationships, supporting effective and efficient building information access and query. This study can benefit a vast number of future studies in the area of building information query by improving its accessibility and queryability.