GViz - An interactive webapp to support GeosparQL over integrated building information

Abstract

Linked data (LD) is a technology to support publishing structured data on the web so that it may be interlinked. Building Information Modelling (BIM) is a key enabler to support integration of building data within the buildings life cycle (BLC). LD can therefore provide better access and more semantically useful querying of BIM data. The integration of BIM into the geospatial domain provides much needed contextual information about the building and its surroundings, and can support geospatial querying over BIM data. Creating GeoSPARQL queries for users who are non experts in semantic web technologies can be a challenge. In this paper we present a visualization tool built upon HTML5 and WebGL technologies that supports queries over linked data without the need to understand the resulting SPARQL queries. The interactive web interface can be quickly extended to support new use cases, for example, related to 3D geometries. The paper discusses the underlying data management, the methodology for uplifting several open data sources into Resource Description Framework (RDF), and the front-end implementation tested over a sample use case. Finally some discussion and future work is given, with a focus on how this tool can potentially support BIM integration.