Bim-Citygml Data Integration For Modern Urban Challenges

Modern cities require innovative urban design and development approaches that are efficiently tailored for neighborhood needs. To achieve this, decision makers must deal with information from both the micro (building asset) and the macro (neighborhood) levels, consequently deal with two very different information scopes and standards. This paper addresses this issue and introduces a new conceptual approach for developing a hybrid information infrastructure by integrating building design data, in the form of ifcXML, and 3D neighborhood models, in the form of CityGML. This paper uses examples from the operations and maintenance domain to explain the need for data integration to support decision makers at the neighborhood level by providing access to a wide range of detailed data, starting from the neighborhood scale and zooming in to a room in a building. The BIM-CityGML Data Integration (BCDI) approach that is introduced in this research satisfies both geometric and nongeometric (semantic) information queries in real time. This feature distinguishes BCDI significantly from related works that mainly focus on data conversion from one source to another. Furthermore, this work provides deep insights into the data structure of ifcXML and CityGML and discusses data mapping issues between these two common data standards.