A rule-based methodology to extract building model views

In this paper, we present a novel approach called IfcView that relies on Semantic Web technologies for creating building views. To do so, we consider an ifcOWL ontology proposed by buildingSMART. The ifcOWL is an Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) based ontology. By combining the ifcOWL ontology with logical rules (expressed in Semantic Web Rule Language, SWRL), we demonstrate through several case studies that our approach can perform a more intuitive and flexible extraction of building views when compared to the Model View Definition (MVD) approach. This is because our rule-based approach dynamically creates sub-graphs (i.e. views) by specifying the IFC elements to extract as Globally Unique Identifiers (GUID), relationships or entities. Another benefit of our approach is the fact that it simplifies the maintenance and definition of building views. Once our rule-based system extracts such a building view (i.e. sub-graph), this view can be exported by using STEP (STandard for the Exchange of Product) or Turtle (a Resource Description Framework (RDF) syntax) formats.