ABSTRACT
The development of high-level standard representations of buildings has been welcomed by the majority within the industry. Such standards allow for semantic interoperability between the large number of design tools which are available to practitioners in the A/E/C and FM industries. However, with such standards comes greater reliance on the information contained within the models which are transmitted, and interpreted, automatically between design tools. Unlike geometry-based standards (e.g., DXF, IGES, DWG, etc) where there was always an expectation of human interpretation, this semantic data must be correct to fit within the interoperable world we have developed. Testing of the semantic interoperability of a small number of commercial design tools has shown that this level of trust is not yet able to be assumed and that further work needs to be done to ensure that we can preserve meaning when moving semantic information between design tools.
