Standard-oriented ontology export of domain catalogues from data dictionaries

The use of standardised data dictionaries is becoming increasingly important in the construction industry. Property servers such as the buildingSMART Data Dictionary (bSDD), the freeBIM property server or the BIM Portal Germany have therefore been developed for the uniform provision of data dictionaries. These are used in the Building Information Modelling (BIM) process to describe objects with predefined properties. At the same time, data dictionaries are being linked across domain boundaries. This may be achieved with the help of Semantic Web technologies. The data dictionaries must also be made available as ontologies, as it has already been done with the ifcOWL ontology for the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), for example. The aim must be for property servers to be able to export the uniform, and in future also cross-domain, data dictionaries as ontologies in the Web Ontology Language (OWL). Initial approaches for the bSDD have already been developed. Our paper presents an approach for an OWL export based on the ISO 12006-3 meta standard. The metamodel described therein is used to organise information about construction works. It is implemented in our self-developed open source property server editor datacat. The export is explained with the 2016 version of the ISO 12006-3 standard, while the implementation of the new 2022 version is currently in progress. The two versions of the standard will be compared and their changes presented.

VIVO