A Linked Building Data Approach to Site Planning and Managing Temporary Construction Items

Building Information Modeling (BIM) has brought great benefits to the construction industry by gathering all information in a project and making it available to the involved stakeholders. However, BIM has predominantly generated value in the design phase of a project, while the potential benefits in the construction phase have been disregarded for many years and are now gaining importance. Trending advancements try to utilize existing BIM data, e.g by linking a digital building model with planning efforts of the construction project and create new knowledge to improve construction. In this paper, we are interested in exploring how semantic models and Linked Building Data (LBD) can support value creation in the construction phase. The presented use case tries to answer the question how the planning of Temporary Construction Items (TCIs) can be improved by semantically describing and classifying TCIs in an ontology that allows to utilize TCI information with BIM data. TCIs only experience little attention in the current planning of construction projects but have a critical impact on the outcome of a project. Thus, the creation of an ontology in this field shall lead to a better and more automated consideration of TCIs in construction planning. Here, we follow the recommendation of the W3C - LBD community group to extend or develop new ontologies and propose the TCI ontology³ as the main contribution. We first introduce the TCI ontology and its relation to other ontologies. Then we demonstrate the value of the ontology by answering competency questions and finally provide a proof of concept of planning TCIs by utilizing the new ontology. The proposal of the TCI ontology is accompanied by a second ontology for Location-Based Scheduling (LBS) to consider the time dimension of planning. The main focus, however, lies on the development and presentation of the TCI ontology whereas the LBS ontology will be further developed in future research.