COBieOWL, an OWL Ontology Based on COBie Standard

Building Information Modelling BIM standards have been recognized by construction and political actors as a highly promising tool for resolving issues of data dematerialization, notably in the field of Architecture, Engineering, Construction and Facility Management. Among worldwide-adopted BIM standards, there is COBie. COBie's goals are to dematerialize building data and to enhance building information interoperability. Nevertheless, COBie data is available in static formats such as STEP or spreadsheet templates. Such formats lack logical formalisms and semantic features provided by languages such as OWL. Because of this, in this paper, we propose a method for semi-automatically conceiving an OWL ontology for the COBie standard starting from a COBie spreadsheet template. We call this ontology COBieOWL and we populate it directly from COBie spreadsheet data files as used by building actors. We also discuss various benefits of adopting our approach, for example: it reduces semantic heterogeneity of the COBie model. Besides, we discuss how COBieOWL can be linked to other LOD datasets such as FOAF.