Digital Cultural Heritage: Semantic Enrichment and Modelling in BIM Environment

The ongoing EU funded INCEPTION project proposes a significant improvement in the 3D modelling for the enhancement of Cultural Heritage knowledge by the use of a BIM approach for the semantic enrichment and management of models. Indeed, when used in the CH field, semantic BIM will be able to connect different users (e.g. scholars, technicians, citizens, governments), supporting the need for interpretation of the cultural heritage model. The expectations on this are quite broad, but the architectural differences make the task quite difficult. Since every building is the final result of different influences and combinations in order to solve practical problems, as well as further additions and changes during time, the INCEPTION project is developing common parameters, setting a nomenclature or “glossary of names” as a starting point to semantic enrichment and modelling in BIM environment. One of the main issues in creating a nomenclature is that there are many different active sources that all have very valuable information that would be interesting to be reused. Furthermore, this means both valuable but potentially competing information needs to be connected. Semantic Web technology and Linked Open Data principles make it possible to define an open H-BIM ontology. This state-of-the-art technology is developed by members of the W3C organization and is at the moment, a mature technology. INCEPTION makes use of the tools available, supporting these standards.