IDBE Pilot
For more information please contact innovation@ogc.org
Interoperability between Geospatial and Building Information Models. An OGC/bSI Integrated Digital Built Environment Call for Sponsors
1. Join us to Boost IDBE Interoperability
Over the last decade, impressive progress has been made in developing open standards for geospatial and AECO (architecture, engineering, construction, and operations) views of city buildings and infrastructure. Today, standards supporting the integration of the two are missing. The geospatial community has its roots in a geographic information systems view of the world, i.e., focuses on analytical and visualization tasks for geographic data. The AECOM community with their Building Information Model (BIM) data on the other hand focuses on reliable digital representations of a built asset like buildings or infrastructure during its development with detailed plans for the entire lifecycle of construction, operation, and maintenance. With progress being made on both sides, the integration potential for data from both sides seems better than ever before. The market for integrated full life-cycle geospatial/BIM data, including all phases of DBFM (Design, Build, Finance, Maintain) is constantly growing and there is an increasing demand for service provisioning throughout the entire lifecycle of DBFM projects.
The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), supported by buildingSMART International (bSI), invites interested organizations to sponsor an OGC Innovation Program initiative that explores the current state-of-the-art in geospatial and BIM data integration based on meaningful real-world use cases. Both communities build on different data modeling approaches with respect to fundamental concepts, semantics, access, level-of-detail, and several other aspects. With open standards such as CityGML, LandInfra/InfraGML, IndoorGML, and IMDF on the geospatial side and IFC (Industry Foundation Classes), ISO19650, and the openCDE API portfolio on the BIM side maturing, it is now time to learn what level of interoperability is already achieved and how to expand this most efficiently. The following questions shall be addressed: Does the integration at an API level meet use case requirements? Where are the main integration hurdles and obstacles? What modifications need to be applied to existing standards to further satisfy the markets’ demands for integrated solutions? The goal of this pilot is not to achieve full integration of data from the geospatial and BIM side, which might be hard to achieve, but to understand the current level of interoperability and the path towards better integrated solutions.
Sponsors of the IDBE Pilot will push forward the integration of both the geospatial and BIM perspectives and will benefit from the analysis of the current integration capabilities. The analysis is expected to lead to further joint standardization work between OGC and bSI. Thus, sponsors support the convergence of geospatial and BIM models, which will lead to substantial savings during the full design, build, finance, and maintain process. To get in contact, please use the OGC Innovation Program contact form. Response period ends September 30st, 2021.
The OGC Innovation Program (OGC IP) is an innovative, collaborative, and hands-on engineering and rapid prototyping program. In the IP, OGC members bring forward technology and technology integration challenges. These challenges are refined and mapped to a set of requirements, use cases, and implementation scenarios and eventually addressed in different types of initiatives. These initiatives bring OGC vendors and research institutions together with sponsoring organizations. Coordinated and managed by the OGC IP Team, each initiative has the goal to stepwise increase Technology Readiness Levels (TRL) for geospatial IT solutions, including software architecture, interface design, information and data models, as well as related standards and specifications. Run globally, the Innovation Program further validates and tests geospatial technology based on OGC standards and identifies future OGC standardization work items.
Depending on sponsors’ interest, OGC will organize a Pilot or Plugfest Innovation Program initiative. A pilot unites technology users with technology solution providers in a fast-paced collaborative prototyping environment to test and evaluate implementation of existing or candidate standards. Pilots serve as an incubator to prioritize, encourage, and accelerate the pace at which standards-based capabilities are deployed to improve interoperability within a specific domain or user community. OGC Plugfests are initiatives where vendors cooperatively test (and possibly refine) their standards-based products in a hands-on engineering setting. Plugfests, located at TRL (Technology Readiness Level) 6-8, are used to (1) assess the degree to which different products in the marketplace interoperate based on their implementation of standards and (2) advance the interoperability of geospatial products and services based on OGC standards in general or within specific communities.
This initiative will be supported by buildingSMART International, a vendor-neutral and not for profit body that leads the development of open digital information flows across the built asset industry. Its mission is to proactively support industry participants who want to develop open standards for planning, design, procurement, assembly and operation of buildings and infrastructure worldwide. It provides the international network plus the necessary technical and process support. Its members, who range from across the built environment spectrum, collaborate under the buildingSMART organization. buildingSMART is engaged with other international standards bodies such as ISO, the European Committee for Standardisation (CEN) and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). Its core Industry Foundation Class (IFC) standards achieved ISO approval in 2012.
3.1. Use Cases Inventory/Portfolio Use Case
- Identifying and querying asset information from different information sources (differently structured input data)
- Geometry: Is it sufficient to define faces or is Constructive Solid Geometry required?
- Detail of a building: What do I need to know about the building for a specific use case, including both geometry and properties?
- Zooming in and out in time.
- Semantics: do we understand the same thing when we talk about an object? (i.e. do we have the same definition for a roof, column, window, etc?).
- Aggregate across buildings (i.e. how much roof space of a particular roof type or pump type do we have?).
- Identify how a building portfolio fits into the wider community/neighbourhood.
3.2. Condition Assessment Use Case
3.3. Building Occupancy Use Case
- Create a simplified description of a building(s)
- How many rooms are in the building? (extract or derive information from CityGML and BIM data)
- Link from one representation to the other, i.e., from room X in CityGML to room X in IFC/BIM (requires the analysis of principle differences between GML geometry and CSG geometry from IFC)
- Host these simplified building representations using different, existing technologies
- Create a Web service Architecture to connect to these building data
- Provide a simple application to calculate the occupancy and building assessment use cases based on a simple set of rules
3.4. Extensions to the Core Set of Use-Cases
- Extract geometry of spaces (rooms, corridors, doors, openings, etc) according to a predefined user profile
- Construct a navigation network
- Host the geometry and the network using different system architectures and technologies
- Create an app to compute a navigation path for a user of the specified groups.
- Link with existing outdoor network and compute indoor-outdoor path
- What does an integration architecture look like? What level of integration is targeted by the community?
- What functionality is supported by available client software?
- Support for multiple formats
- In-client format conversion
- Generalization
- Cross-format links
- What data services are currently available, what data format do they offer?
- Several formats will be tested to handle the integration challenges on the client side
- Transformation services shall be explored that address parts of the integration challenge as-a-Service (aaS)
- What APIs are required to handle integration?
- Transformation service with API from one data representation to another
- Simplification/generalization aspects
- What integration elements are already supported by OGC APIs, in particular OGC API-Features or the buildingSMART openCDE APIs, which are considered essential elements in the integration architecture?
- What instances are already in use?
- What functionality has been explored and can be demonstrated?
- What is the best exchange format?
- Common format between geospatial and AECOM?
- Common semantics?
- What roles does JSON play?
- What role does 3D GeoVolume API play? How to best allows access to 3D data in native formats (3D Tiles, I3S, CDB, glTF) or from the BIM perspective IFC (step part 42).