Access and Semantic Level Integration of Building Models for Cooperative Fire Protection Planning

Abstract

Planning processes in civil engineering are characterized by a large number of participants and a high amount of planning information stored in distributed and heterogeneous partial models. A main goal of the presented project is to provide engineers with integrated views on the relevant technical planning information. To realise this, two aspects have to be considered: access level integration and semantic level integration. For the integration of partial models on the access level, different approaches like Web Services and mobile agents have been developed in the last several years. An agent-based approach for model integration is presented in the first part of the paper. However, in this context the core problem is the implicit and frequently inconsistent semantics of the information. Thus, the second focus of the paper is on the interoperability on the semantic level. To provide engineers with integrated transparent views on the model data, domain specific ontologies and mappings between these ontologies and different database schemas have been developed. A combined approach for the integration of distributed heterogeneous partial models in civil engineering planning processes on the access level and the semantic level is presented in this paper.