Ontology-Based Data Integration and Sharing for Facility Maintenance Management

Information interoperability among different systems is essential to support knowledge sharing in the architecture, engineering, construction, and facilities management (AEC/FM) industry. Currently, technologies such as building information modelling (BIM) and internet of things (IoT) are increasingly being applied to improve facility maintenance management (FMM). However, the prevalent use of different data representations for BIM, IoT, and FM data makes data integration difficult among these three domains. Although studies have been performed to develop domain level data representations, study on data integration among BIM, IoT, and FM system for FMM is still lacking. The data integration can benefit the efficiency of FMM. Therefore, an ontology-based framework is proposed for data integration among BIM, IoT, and FM domains for FMM. The proposed ontology-based framework comprises four primary steps. First, identify the information requirement and collect the required information. Second, development of three domain level ontological representations for BIM, IoT, and FMM by studying existing data representations, FMM guidelines, and interviews with FM experts. Third, development of mapping rules that address syntactic and structural level heterogeneity among the three ontologies. Finally, development of logic rules for aiding in reasoning to infer implicit facts specific to FMM and thereby support relevant queries. The developed framework is validated through an illustrative example of maintenance activities.