BIM Search Engine: Effects of Object Relationships and Information Standards

As Building Information Modeling (BIM) models are getting bigger, with more information linked to geometrical 3D models, a dedicated BIM search engine is important. A BIM search engine was developed to examine the value of exploiting a 3D object's topological relationships to other 3D objects when assessing that object's relevance to a query. The impacts of two information standards, the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) and Uniclass-2015, on information retrieval (IR) performance were also measured. The 3DIR Autodesk Revit toolset was used on a structural model of a 16-story building from an industry partner. The retrieval performance measures of Precision and Recall did not clearly highlight the benefit, although the increased relevance values of those objects deemed by experts to be relevant demonstrates the promise of such contextual measures. The effect of shifting from the native Revit file format to various standards was tested: IR performance was poor with the Uniclass-2015 dataset and was comparable to the Revit native model with the IFC model. Although not shown conclusively to improve retrieval performance, the contextual relevance measures presented in this paper are promising and constitute a significant original contribution. Future research is needed to fine-tune these measures and fully realize their potential.