Live Web Ontology for buildingSMART Data Dictionary

The aspiration of Linked Building Data is in accelerating construction processes, improved collaboration, facilitating facility management, and an interlingua for the BIM domain. Linked Building Data is widely used in research projects and actively advances by the researchers in the World Wide Web Consortium Linked Building Data Community Group. buildingSMART is a worldwide organization that develops standards to enable collaboration and digital BIM workflows. The buildingSMART Data Dictionary (bSDD) is an international standard that defines a hierarchically structured encyclopedia of object concepts and their properties used in building information models. It is provided as is an online service. While there have been earlier work where data exports of bSDD have been expressed as the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and used in linked data, a consistent approach for keeping them automatically up to date has been missing. In this work, I study how to publish the buildingSMART Data Dictionary classifications and terms as a web ontology, use them in the Linked Building Data context, and keep the data in sync with the buildingSMART Data Dictionary primary data. I present an online ontology generator that ad-hoc provides up-to-date ontology descriptions of concepts in the buildingSMART database.The earlier work is presented in this work, and the feasibility of the online live updates for the ontologies that reflect the bSDD database data is shown. The results are reflected and compared with the earlier work. This paper summarizes ways to publish the bSDD vocabularies as linked data in a sustainable way.