Journal of Information Technology in Construction
Journal of Information Technology in Construction
ITcon Vol. 30, pg. 1768-1795, http://www.itcon.org/2025/73
An ontology-driven bi-directional workflow for integrating project management data into the IFC standard
| DOI: | 10.36680/j.itcon.2025.073 | |
| submitted: | July 2025 | |
| revised: | November 2025 | |
| published: | December 2025 | |
| editor(s): | Turk Z | |
| authors: | Venkatesh Kone, Research Scholar
Department of Civil Engineering, National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal, India ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6398-5850 konevenkatesh92@gmail.com Gangadhar Mahesh, Professor Department of Civil Engineering, National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal, India ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1914-1519 gangadharmahesh@gmail.com | |
| summary: | The evolution of Building Information Modelling (BIM) towards a data-centric paradigm is often hindered by challenges in semantic interoperability, particularly when integrating project management data with the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) standard. While IFC enables syntactic data exchange, a persistent gap exists dynamically linking building geometry with the complex, relational information of project schedules, resources, and costs in a semantically consistent, interoperable manner. This paper presents a novel, bi-directional methodology that leverages Semantic Web technologies (RDF, OWL, SPARQL) to address this challenge. The core of the methodology is an ontology-driven workflow that uses two purpose-built ontologies: BIMOnto, a lightweight representation of the building asset derived from ifcOWL, and IproK (Integrated Project Knowledge Ontology), which formally structures project management information across schedule, resource, and cost domains. The workflow enables both directions: (1) transforming IFC models into queryable knowledge graphs, and (2) programmatically generating new, enriched IFC models from unified knowledge graphs. This reverse transformation creates native, standards-compliant IFC entities for tasks (IfcTask), resources (IfcResource), costs (IfcCostItem), and their standard relationships (IfcRelAssignsToProduct, etc.), moving beyond custom property sets. The feasibility and effectiveness of this approach are validated through a case study using a multi-story residential building model, demonstrating the successful generation of a verifiable, integrated BIM artifact. The findings show that this ontology-driven framework significantly enhances data integration, creating truly interoperable models where process data becomes a first-class citizen within the BIM environment, advancing the potential for more intelligent, data-centric BIM practices throughout the project lifecycle. | |
| keywords: | building information modelling (BIM), ontology, knowledge graph, industry foundation classes (IFC), semantic interoperability, bi-directional workflow | |
| full text: | (PDF file, 2.001 MB) | |
| citation: | Kone V, Mahesh G (2025). An ontology-driven bi-directional workflow for integrating project management data into the IFC standard, ITcon Vol. 30, pg. 1768-1795, https://doi.org/10.36680/j.itcon.2025.073 | |
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