The handover and validation of as-built information according to Linked Open Data principles for digital asset management

The current innovation Building Information Management (BIM) shows potential during the operations & maintenance phase of a building to save costs, improve collaboration and increase efficiency. After the handover, all the information in the transferred BIM models should be of sufficient quality and validated before being used during asset management. Open BIM standards, such as IFC, IDM and BCF are recommended to be used during project management, however the handover process asks for a more elaborated information structure. According to the literature research the recommended structure to implement is linked open data. When the handover information should be transferred, a container structure, such as ICDD, can be used to provide links between objects, documents and information. This structure also fulfills the requirements of the asset management derived from the case study at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol.

These findings result in a new process model, that initiates the ICDD as a handover format which will process the information to a new environment based on linked open data. Before the ICDD can be implemented, an ontology, which contains the information structure of the new environment, is defined. The UDO is constructed according to the defined requirements of the organization. An alignment with other ontologies and an easy extension of the ontology can be made. The constructed ontology is tested in a proof of concept according to a developed application. From the results of the application, it can be concluded that most information can be extracted and transferred from IFC models, even though, some information is missing. Because of the linked open data structure, however, there is a potential in using the application to find indirect relations between objects and properties with the help of queries. This new information structure is able to transfer, validate and use as-built information based on open standards and to provide in an object-based structure. With the use of semantics, the as-built information can be validated automatically based on completeness and correctness of the data. In the future, the use of linked open data will give the best opportunity to capture more added value during asset management processes.