ABSTRACT

In the most recent years, the Semantic Web applied to Building Information Modelling and Industry Foundation Classes are the most widely recognized efforts in the digitalization of products in the architectural, engineering and construction industry. This study performs knowledge discovery of construction products from domain experts to build an ontology. However, ontology developed becomes an isolated conceptualization. In order to get rich domain ontology, novel approach is to retrieve knowledge from domain-specific online product repositories such as the industry foundation classes. This study identifies similarities between the industry foundation classes and ontology likewise their differences with the hope that it would develop an enhanced knowledge conceptualization of the domain. Integration of IFC and ontology will mean that concepts represent well-established standard terms rich in domain knowledge. Other semantic web technologies can then be exploited on the resulting application to perform data querying, consistency checking, data reasoning, knowledge inference and so much more. Thus, the resulting ontology could be standardized and be easily applied for use in practice in the industry.