THE NEED FOR A DIFFERENTIATION BETWEEN HETEROGENEOUS INFORMATION INTEGRATION APPROACHES IN THE FIELD OF “BIM-GIS INTEGRATION”: A LITERATURE REVIEW

Abstract. The heterogeneous character of information models results in communication barriers between subsystems in railway organizations dealing with Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Geographic information systems (GIS). The integration of information is a promising way to bridge the heterogeneity of information models and satisfy the need for a more efficient communication. Integration efforts exploited in expert literature are often referenced using umbrella terms like “BIM-GIS Integration” or “GeoBIM”, although dealing with different challenges and addressing different purposes. This paper highlights the need for a differentiation between integration efforts covered by the umbrella term “BIM-GIS integration”. For this, a new approach for the categorization of information integration efforts was developed based on a literature research. Afterwards, challenges concerning information integration efforts in the field of “BIM-GIS Integration” were exploited and assigned to the respective categories to illustrate the importance of differentiation between heterogeneous information integration efforts.