Merging BIM and GIS using ontologies application to urban facility management in ACTIVe3D

This article presents the research work done in order to reduce the gap of heterogeneity between Geographic Information System and Building Information Models. The goal is to extend a platform dedicated to facility management called ACTIVe3D. We want to enlarge its scope to take into account the management of urban elements contained in the building environment, as well as other buildings. The particularity of the platform is that data can be accessed either by a semantic view or through a 3D interface. The SIGA3D project describes a set of processes that aims, for all the stakeholders of urban projects, to manage pieces of information through all the lifecycle of construction projects. To solve the heterogeneity problem between BIM and GIS, we developed a semantic extension to the BIM called UIM (Urban Information Modeling). This extension defines spatial, temporal and multi-representation concepts to build an extensible ontology. The knowledge database can be populated with information coming from standards like IFC and CityGML. This information system has been adapted and implemented into the existing platform and is today fully operational and used by thousands of users.