OPENBIM VISUALIZER – A VISUALIZATION TOOL
FOR VIEWING THE IFC DATA MODEL
Yang-Hsiu Tong1, Chih-Hsiung Chang2, Yi-Wei Chen3 and I-Chen Wu4
1) Graduate Student, Department of Civil Engineering, National Kaohsiung University of Applied Sciences, Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Email: [email protected]
2) Undergraduate Student, Department of Civil Engineering, National Kaohsiung University of Applied Sciences, Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Email: [email protected]
3) Undergraduate Student, Department of Civil Engineering, National Kaohsiung University of Applied Sciences, Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Email: [email protected]
4) Associate Professor, Department of Civil Engineering, National Kaohsiung University of Applied Sciences, Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Email: [email protected]
Abstract: The Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) data model is an open standard design to support the goals of Open BIM for data sharing and information integration in building information modeling (BIM). It is an object-oriented data model based on class definitions representing the items (elements, processes, shapes, and so on) that are used by software applications during a construction or facility management project. However, large volumes of IFC data are difficult to comprehend when displayed in text-views or tree-views. The project participants cannot know the project status completely if they do not have a good and user-friendly visualization tool to display the related project information. Therefore, this research develops OpenBIM Visualizer for facilitating IFC data model visualization. The design and implementation of these useful graphs employs HTML5 and JavaScript. HTML5 is a unified and multi-platform content enabler that is capable of realizing mobile applications and websites. JavaScript can support the creation of interactive elements and effects for expanding the manipulation ability of a graphical user interface (GUI). These graphs can provide multiple visualization styles for assisting project participants to obtain the required information from an IFC data model, as well as to consider a wide variety of information when controlling the project and making project decisions. Keywords: Building Information Modeling (BIM), Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), Data Visualization, Infographic.
1. INTRODUCTION
Building information modeling (BIM) has been widely used in the construction industry owing to its benefits and capabilities for information integration, visualization, and parametric design. However, due to the variety of participants in engineering projects, the differences between data definition, data format, and data storage increase the difficulty of integrating data from diverse sources. Over the last decade, the construction industry has invested considerable effort into integrating project information.
Therefore, buildingSMART proposed the concept of Open BIM and developed Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) to solve this problem. The IFC standard has already been accepted as the information standard for buildings (Fan, 2007). IFC is an open information model used to exchange and share information for buildings. IFC can integrate data that were generated from different BIM systems. The interoperability of the IFC data model has been studied in many research projects. Researchers such as Eastman et al. (2010) have said that the IFC standard building model schema is necessary for achieving full interoperability between BIM tools. Zhang
et al. (2011) proposed a semantic web services framework utilizing IFC-based industry ontology to address the
interoperability problem.
Nevertheless, several papers have reported problems in data exchange using IFC. Some of the issues identified and discussed include the classification of objects, instances, geometry, relationships, and rules, which are supported in the IFC schema, and the complexities of exchanging such information accurately between applications (Venugopal et al., 2012). Most BIM systems can only display the 3D geometry of an IFC data model and suffer from incomplete data or data loss. Meanwhile, a general IFC data viewer can only view IFC data via a tree-view or a text-view. From the above-mentioned research, the shortcomings of IFC data deficiency in BIM systems, especially in the loss of non-graphical attributes, is clear. Although IFC files have rich data about construction projects, the data is not used efficiently, causing an “Information Poor” situation (Russell et
al., 2011). Although IFC data models can fulfill the goals of information integration and interoperability, they
still fall short of providing a good visualization tool for viewing the integrated data.
Visualization is a major concern in a wide variety of applications, such as information visualization, interaction techniques and architectures, modeling techniques, multi-resolution methods, visualization algorithms and techniques, and volume visualization (Post, 2002). Some studies have focused on data visualization. For example, Saraiya et al. (2005) have discussed the visualization of graphs with associated time series data. Herman et al. (2000) investigated the hierarchical structure of the data type and demonstrated various graphs for hierarchical structures of data. Blanch & Lecolinet (2007) proposed browsing zoomable treemaps for
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5. CONCLUSIONS
The Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) data model can integrate various types of engineering information from different project participants. However, common software or applications that are developed in-house can only show 3D models and attributes, and are not sufficient to convey project information for communication with others. Therefore, this research developed the OpenBIM Visualizer, which is a visualization tool for viewing the IFC data model. This tool can parse the IFC data model and visualize two-dimensional (2D) BIM information via different graphs such as Gantt charts, pie charts, bar charts, networks, S-curve graphs, and so on. Furthermore, it can view information and graphs over the Internet without the limitations of time or distance. This tool can facilitate communication and distribution of information between related participants, such as construction companies, building owners, and architectural companies in order to manage projects effectively and efficiently.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The research presented in this paper was carried out within the Intelligent Monitoring and Green Facility Information Modeling (IM Green FIM) project, which was funded by Ministry of Economic Affairs, Taiwan. REFERENCES
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