A SEMANTIC GRAPH DATABASE FOR BIM-GIS INTEGRATED INFORMATION MODEL FOR AN INTELLIGENT URBAN MOBILITY WEB APPLICATION

Abstract. Over the recent years, the usage of semantic web technologies and Resources Description Framework (RDF) data models have been notably increased in many fields. Multiple systems are using RDF data to describe information resources and semantic associations. RDF data plays a very important role in advanced information retrieval, and graphs are efficient ways to visualize and represent real world data by providing solutions to many real-time scenarios that can be simulated and implemented using graph databases, and efficiently query graphs with multiple attributes representing different domains of knowledge. Given that graph databases are schema less with efficient storage for semi-structured data, they can provide fast and deep traversals instead of slow RDBMS SQL based joins allowing Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation and durability (ACID) transactions with rollback support, and by utilizing mathematics of graph they can enormous potential for fast data extraction and storage of information in the form of nodes and relationships. In this paper, we are presenting an architectural design with complete implementation of BIM-GIS integrated RDF graph database. The proposed integration approach is composed of four main phases: ontological BIM and GIS model’s construction, mapping and semantic integration using interoperable data formats, then an import into a graph database with querying and filtering capabilities. The workflows and transformations of IFC and CityGML schemas into object graph databases model are developed and applied to an intelligent urban mobility web application on a game engine platform validate the integration methodology.