Identification of Property Boundaries Using an IFC-Based Cadastral Database

Property boundaries have a significant importance in cadaster as they define the legal extent of the ownership rights. Among 3D data models, Industry Foundation Class (IFC) provides the potential capabilities for modelling property boundaries in a 3D environment. In some jurisdictions, such as Victoria, Australia, some property boundaries are assigned to the faces of building elements which are modelled as solids in IFC. In order to retrieve these property boundaries, boundary identification analysis should be performed, and faces of building elements should be extracted. However, extracting faces of solids from an IFC file is not possible as faces of solids are not considered as a separate object-type. Therefore, this paper aims to develop a spatial query approach for the identification of property boundaries using 3D spatial operators of a database to address this problem. The viability of the developed approach is tested using an IFC-based 3D cadastral database with two real datasets and one test dataset. The proposed methodology not only supports vertical walls and horizontal roofs but can also be used for detecting boundaries in properties surrounded by complex building structures such as oblique and curved walls and roofs.