Sharing Linked Building Data in a Peer-to-Peer Network: ifcOWL Meets InterPlanetary File System

Oraskari, J and Törmä, S and Yalcinkaya, M and Singh, V and Beetz, J (2024) Sharing Linked Building Data in a Peer-to-Peer Network: ifcOWL Meets InterPlanetary File System. In: Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering, 38 (1).

PDF jou_com_civ_eng_38-1_2024.pdf - Published Version Restricted to Registered users only Download (3MB) | Request a copy

Abstract

The recent and significant change in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry is the increasing use of building information management (BIM) tools in design and how the generated digital data are consumed. Although designers have primarily published blueprints and model files, multiple parties are now involved in producing different aspects of the data and may be consuming data produced by others. This evolution has created new challenges in sharing and synchronizing information across organizational boundaries. Linked building data is a community effort identified as a potential means of overcoming the barriers to data interoperability. In this paper, we present how the industry can be strengthened using a peer-to-peer network based on the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) framework to address the typical availability problems of web-based data. The paper particularly presents how Linked Data serialization of the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) standard can be used in the context of IPFS and benchmarks the performance for the publication of models between IPFS versus HTTP protocol. We show that linked building data - in particular, IFC models converted into Resource Description Format (RDF) graphs according to the ifcOWL ontology - can be implemented using the framework, with initial indications of significant benefits of a peer-to-peer network in terms of performance, offline access, and immutable version history. Two use cases in distributed collaborative environments in the AEC/facility management (FM) sector using evolving multidomain models are used to evaluate the work. © 2023 American Society of Civil Engineers.

Item Type:	Journal Article
Publication:	Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering
Publisher:	American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE)
Additional Information:	The copyright for this article belongs to the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE).
Keywords:	Architectural design; Benchmarking; Data handling; Distributed computer systems; File organization; HTTP; Hypertext systems; Information management; Linked data; Resource Description Framework (RDF), Architecture engineering; Data interoperability; Digital datas; Filesystem; Management tool; Network-based; Organizational boundaries; Peer-to-peer networks; Performance; System framework, Peer to peer networks
Department/Centre:	Division of Mechanical Sciences > Centre for Product Design & Manufacturing
Date Deposited:	08 Dec 2023 11:17
Last Modified:	08 Dec 2023 11:17
URI:	https://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/83331

Actions (login required)

View Item