ABSTRACT
In a collaboration environment like the building industry, being able to obtain information with sufficient quality is fundamental for working operations. Many researches have suggested that this objective can be approached by using vendor-neutral and open standards such as the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) to capture and exchange data (Eastman et al 2011, Berlo et al 2012). As a general data model, IFC supports a full range of data exchanges among heterogeneous applications. It has provided a rich set of methods to capture data in order to be compatible with different domains and task scenarios. However, for particular tasks, there is very limited semantics in the underlying EXPRESS schema to specify which information should be exchanged and how it should be modelled (Venogopal et al. 2012). In the schema level “OPTIONAL” and weak typed attributes are the dominant citizens, and the model instances can also be semantically extended by mechanisms such as IfcPropertySet. All of these features have provided the flexibility required by different use-cases but also give too much freedom for application implementers and domain end-users.
