AN ONTOLOGY-DRIVEN BI-DIRECTIONAL WORKFLOW FOR INTEGRATING PROJECT MANAGEMENT DATA INTO THE IFC STANDARD

Abstract

The evolution of Building Information Modelling (BIM) towards a data-centric paradigm is often hindered by challenges in semantic interoperability, particularly when integrating project management data with the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) standard. While IFC enables syntactic data exchange, a persistent gap exists dynamically linking building geometry with the complex, relational information of project schedules, resources, and costs in a semantically consistent, interoperable manner. This paper presents a novel, bi-directional methodology that leverages Semantic Web technologies (RDF, OWL, SPARQL) to address this challenge. The core of the methodology is an ontology-driven workflow that uses two purpose-built ontologies: BIMOnto, a lightweight representation of the building asset derived from if cOWL, and IproK (Integrated Project Knowledge Ontology), which formally structures project management information across schedule, resource, and cost domains. The workflow enables both directions: (1) transforming IFC models into queryable knowledge graphs, and (2) programmatically generating new, enriched IFC models from unified knowledge graphs. This reverse transformation creates native, standards-compliant IFC entities for tasks (IfcTask), resources (IfcResource), costs (IfcCostItem), and their standard relationships (IfcRelAssignsToProduct, etc.), moving beyond custom property sets. The feasibility and effectiveness of this approach are validated through a case study using a multi-story residential building model, demonstrating the successful generation of a verifiable, integrated BIM artifact. The findings show that this ontology-driven framework significantly enhances data integration, creating truly interoperable models where process data becomes a first-class citizen within the BIM environment, advancing the potential for more intelligent, data-centric BIM practices throughout the project lifecycle. © © 2025 The author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.