In the evolving landscape of digitalization, automating building permit processes are crucial for municipalities and other governmental bodies. Our research addresses the complexities of modeling digital building permit regulations, considering the level of the information needs (LoIN) for geometry-based regulations in four municipalities (Prague, Lisbon, Vila Nova de Gaia, and Ascoli Piceno) as case study. We propose a methodology and guidelines for geometrical building modeling, addressing challenges of integrating geoinformation with Building Information Modeling (BIM) for environmental based digital building permit (DBP) checks. This paper provides BIM-IFC geometrical interpretation choices, ensuring a seamless conversion into 3D city models. It offers insights for software companies, developers, and standardization organizations towards in implementing DBP checks, and preliminary results for a future scalable approach.@en

De groeiende adoptie van BIM-modellen maakt het digitaal checken van bouwvergunningen mogelijk. Door ingediende BIM-modellen automatisch te checken, kunnen huidige op pdf-gebaseerde vergunningsprocessen efciënter, maar ook nauwkeuriger en transparanter worden. Bovendien kunnen ontwerpers – als de checktools vrij beschikbaar zijn – zelf al de vergunningscontroles uitvoeren die de gemeente doet na de indiening. Zo kunnen de vergunningsvoorwaarden al in de ontwerpfase worden meegenomen. Nu zijn er vaak meerdere indieningen nodig, voordat een vergunning wordt goedgekeurd. Individuele gemeenten experimenteren al met digitale vergunningverlening. Om digitale vergunningverlening generiek toepasbaar te maken, wordt momenteel het CHEK project (Change toolkit for Digital Building Permit Processing) uitgevoerd.@en

The reuse and integration of data give big opportunities, supported by the FAIR data principles. Seamless data integration from heterogenous sources has been an interest of the geospatial community for a long time. However, 3D city models, building information models, and information supporting smart cities present higher semantic and geometrical complexity, which pose new challenges never tackled in a comprehensive methodology. Building on previous theories and studies, this article proposes an overarching workflow and framework for multisource (geo)spatial data integration. It starts from the definition of use case-based requirements for the integrated data, guides the analysis of integrability of the involved datasets, suggesting actions to harmonize them, until data merging and validation. It is finally tested and exemplified in a case study. This approach allows the development of consistent, well-documented, and inclusive data integration workflows, for the sake of use case automation in various geospatial domains and the production of interoperable and reusable data.

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Growing interest is awarded to the digitalization of the building permitting use case and many works are developed about the topic. However, the subject is very complex and many aspects are usually tackled separately, making it very hard for traditional literature reviews to grasp the actual progress in the overall topic. This paper unveils the detailed state of the art in Digital Building Permitting (DBP) by critically analysing the literature by means of a set of coding tags (research progress, implementation, affected DBP workflow steps, ambitions addressed) assigned by a multidisciplinary team. The executed research shows that the mainly addressed aspects of the digitalization of building permit process are the technologies to check the compliance of design proposals against regulations, followed by the digitalization of regulations. Improvable aspects identified in the entire building permit system are instead e.g. the involvement of officers, scalability of solutions and interoperability of data, intended both as data validation and as integration of geospatial data with building models.

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To support building permit issuing with automatic digital tools, the reuse of models produced by designers would make the process quicker and more objective. However, current studies and pilots often leave a gap with respect to the models as actually provided by architects, having varying quality and content. In this study, rather than taking a top down approach, we started from the available data and made the necessary inferences, which gave the opportunity to tackle basic and common issues often preventing smooth automatic processing. Specific characteristics of the IFC models were outlined and a tool was developed to extract the necessary information from them to check representative regulations. While the case study is specific in location, regulations and input models, the type of issues encountered are a generally applicable example for automated code compliance checking. This represents a solid base for future works towards the automation of building permits issuing.

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Purpose: The study, within the Increasing Resilience of Cultural Heritage (ResCult) project, aims to support civil protection to prevent, lessen and mitigate disasters impacts on cultural heritage using a unique standardised-3D geographical information system (GIS), including both heritage and risk and hazard information. Design/methodology/approach: A top-down approach, starting from existing standards (an INSPIRE extension integrated with other parts from the standardised and shared structure), was completed with a bottom-up integration according to current requirements for disaster prevention procedures and risk analyses. The results were validated and tested in case studies (differentiated concerning the hazard and type of protected heritage) and refined during user forums. Findings: Besides the ensuing reusable database structure, the filling with case studies data underlined the tough challenges and allowed proposing a sample of workflows and possible guidelines. The interfaces are provided to use the obtained knowledge base. Originality/value: The increasing number of natural disasters could severely damage the cultural heritage, causing permanent damage to movable and immovable assets and tangible and intangible heritage. The study provides an original tool properly relating the (spatial) information regarding cultural heritage and the risk factors in a unique archive as a standard-based European tool to cope with these frequent losses, preventing risk.

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In this chapter, we start from the typical concepts from Geographic Information System (GIS): data representation, acquisition, querying and analysis. We follow with the transition from 2 to 3D GIS and describe open standards such as CityGML and CityJSON and recent advances on 3D geospatial simulations, computing and real-time GIS and Internet of Things (IoT). Then we discuss the discrepancies in information management and modelling with respect to Building Information Modelling (BIM) and the related open standard, Industry Foundation Classes (IFC). We highlight the difference between Cartesian engineering coordinate systems and geospatial coordinate reference systems, contrast the procedural geometry definitions of IFC with the explicit geometries of GIS and look at implementation mechanisms such as boundary representations and polyhedral surface models and describe the semantic Level of Detail used in CityGML. The section that follows describes relevant processes supporting integration such as georeferencing, conversion of formats using semantic and geometric approaches and linking of heterogeneous information. We also highlight interoperability challenges that stem from consistency and validity of data, by interpreting the results of a recent benchmark on interoperability of the most common involved data formats (CityGML and IFC). We close with a conclusion and perspectives on the future with case studies on geo-enabled building permit checking and geospatial artificial intelligence and machine learning.

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Municipalities invest a lot of time and person-hours into manual building permit checks. With the increase in computational power and the use of Building Information Models (BIM) in the building design life cycle, several municipalities are investing in automating these checks using BIM and geo-data sets. However, few examples exist of tools effectively using geo-information with BIM. In order to address this gap, a project was developed with the municipality of Rotterdam (NL). In a previous phase, a tool was implemented, able to analyse the BIM data to extract the needed information for a few representative regulations. In order to extend and improve the previously developed tool, a web-based interface is now implemented and geo-data sets are integrated to the process allowing more powerful GeoBIM analysis. Three checks using both BIM and GIS data were implemented and tested: (i) The parcel limit check evaluates if the building's footprint derived from BIM falls within the parcel limit provided from the municipalities' parcel data sets. (ii) The height check evaluates the maximum building's relative height to the road's height. Finally, (iii) the road overhang check detects neighbouring roads to the parcel and evaluates the admissible overhang over that road. This paper presents these developments, including the type of input data that is needed for the checks, the tools for the three new GeoBIM checks (parcel limit check, height check, road overhang check) and the implementation in the web-based tool.

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Nowadays, cultural and historical built heritage can be more effectively preserved, val-orised and documented using advanced geospatial technologies. In such a context, there is a major issue concerning the automation of the process and the extraction of useful information from a huge amount of spatial information acquired by means of advanced survey techniques (i.e., highly detailed LiDAR point clouds). In particular, in the case of historical built heritage (HBH) there are very few effective efforts. Therefore, in this paper, the focus is on establishing the connections between semantic and geometrical information in order to generate a parametric, structured model from point clouds using ontology as an effective approach for the formal conceptualisation of application domains. Hence, in this paper, an ontological schema is proposed to structure HBH representations, starting with international standards, vocabularies, and ontologies (CityGML-Geography Markup Language, International Committee for Documentation conceptual reference model (CIDOC-CRM), Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT), as well as reasoning about morphology of historical centres by analysis of real case studies) to represent the built and architecture domain. The validation of such schema is carried out by means of its use to guide the segmentation of a LiDAR point cloud from a castle, which is later used to generate parametric geometries to be used in a historical building information model (HBIM).

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De term Digital Twin wordt op allerlei manieren gebruikt sinds dit concept een aantal jaren geleden haar intrede deed in het geodomein als veelbelovende technologie om grote maatschappelijke opgaven en omgevingsvraagstukken op te lossen. Hoewel er consensus bestaat over de basisfunctionaliteiten van een Digital Twin, is het risico van de diversiteit aan definities dat alles en niets hieronder valt. Hierdoor kunnen implementaties beperkt blijven tot afzonderlijke – veelal technische – onderdelen, en wordt het beloofde einddoel van een fundamentele oplossing voor maatschappelijke en omgevingsvraagstukken nooit behaald. In dit artikel reflecteren wij op het concept Digital Twin binnen de geo-informatie. We beschrijven de potenties en uitdagingen om Digital Twin in al haar facetten te implementeren in de praktijk, daarbij gebruikmakend van bestaande ervaringen en kennis in het geodomein.@en

Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) is a complete, wide and complex open standard data model to represent Building Information Models. Big efforts are being made by the standardization organization buildingSMART, to develop and maintain this standard in collaboration with researchers, companies and institutions. However, when trying to use IFC models from practice for automatic analysis, some issues emerge, as a consequence of a misalignment between what is prescribed by, or available in, the standard with the data sets that are produced in practice. In this study, a sample of models produced by practitioners for aims different from their explicit use within automatic processing tools is inspected and analyzed. The aim is to find common patterns in data set from practice and their possible discrepancies with the standard, in order to find ways to address such discrepancies in a next step. In particular, it is noticeable that the overall quality of the models requires specific additional care by the modellers before relying on them for automatic analysis, and a high level of variability is present concerning the storage of some relevant information (such as georeferencing).@en

The concept of the digital twin has been gaining significant momentum in the geospatial domain since 2016. Although there is some consensus on the basic features of a digital twin, some critical reflection is still necessary to make the concept tangible. Only then can the digital twin be implemented as a technical solution that scales to real-world problems rather than being an abstract vision for partial solutions. In this article, the authors reflect on the practical digital twin-related challenges in the geospatial domain. @en

Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), the buildingSMART open standard for BIM, is underused with respect to its promising potential, since, according to the experience of practitioners and researchers working with BIM, issues in the standard’s implementation and use prevent its effective use. Nevertheless, a systematic investigation of these issues has never been carried out, and there is thus insufficient evidence for tackling the problems. The GeoBIM benchmark project is aimed at finding such evidence by involving external volunteers, reporting on various aspects of the behavior of tools (geometry, semantics, georeferencing, functionalities), analyzed and described in this article. Interestingly, different IFC software programs with the same standardized data sets yield inconsistent results, with few detectable common patterns, and significant issues are found in their support of the standard, probably due to the very high complexity of the standard data model. A companion article (Part II) describes the results of the benchmark related to CityGML, the counterpart of IFC within geoinformation.

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Because of the need for new sustainable future alternatives, the re-inhabitation of rural areas, hinterlands, small historical urban centres and villages has become a unique real opportunity. Therefore, it is necessary to define and adopt new sustainable urban planning and building permits to follow this path. These processes involve both various actors and disciplines and a variety of spatial and semantic data. For this reason, the present research aims at providing a methodology to build the necessary spatial documentation of historical centres and villages by adopting an ontology-based workflow. Existing ontologies and conceptualisations have been considered together with classes and rules from city historical core regulations. A case study has been selected considering its available spatial datasets and national data models. The bottom-up approach here adopted aims at validating and enriching a reference ontology previously developed in the domain of historical centre by adding new concepts and relations from selected regulation plans and other existing ontologies and data models. Finally, the obtained ontology is also populated with instances of concepts and relations.

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The Industry Foundation Classes are a prevalent open standard to exchange Building Information Models. In such a model, geometric representations are provided for individual building elements along with semantic information, including a significant amount of properties related togeometry and explicit topological relationships. These relationships and quantities introduce redundancies and often inconsistencies as well. Moreover, they introduce complexity in down-stream processing. Combining multiple aspect models into a single model has non-trivial consequences for the connectivity graphs. Programmatic mutations are complicated because of the relationships that need to be updated as a result of changes.In order to alleviate these issues, this paper provides a theoretical frameworkand implementation for both validating and inferring semantic and topological con-structs from the geometric representations, rooted on Egenhofer spatial predicates and extended with the IFC modelling tolerance. Combining these two concepts, wall connectivity is equivalent to the intersection of the wall representation boundaries, where a boundary is not a surface, but rather a hollow solid with a thickness derived from the modelling tolerance.The algorithms presented in this paper are implemented in fully open source software based on the IfcOpenShell software library and the CGAL computational geometry library using Nef polyhedra. We provide a formalization of space boundaries, spatial containment and wall connectivity relationships. The validation and inference rules are applied to a public set of building models. We conclude that exported models have geometric flaws and that several relationships can indeed be inferred by means of generic geometric intersection logic.@en

The digitalization of the process for building permit (involving the use of 3D information systems) is seen as a priority in a wide part of the world. Since it is a very multidisciplinary use case, involving a variety of stakeholders tackling complex issues and topics, some of them joined their efforts and skills in the European Network for Digital Building Permit. The initial activity of the network, after a review of on-going experiences, was a workshop to share knowledge about the topics involved and to identify the main ambitions of the network with respect to three pillars (i.e. Process - Rules and Requirements - Technology) and the related requirements. It was achieved through a collective brainstorming activity guided by digital tools, whose results were further analysed in a post-processing phase. Such results are presented in this paper and will be the base for planning the future network activity.

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Among the digitalization processes which are being raised in Europe and in the world, the building permit process is seen as one of the priorities by municipalities, governmental institutions and standardization organizations. However, in current practice, the building permit issuing as well as the integration of geoinformation with BIM (GeoBIM) suffers from a number of complex sub-issues. These issues still remain and prevent the development of successful methodologies. In this paper, the building permit use case is explored within a project in close collaboration with the municipality of Rotterdam. A very specific case study in Rotterdam was selected as a starting point, which allowed us to develop the needed methodology for the implementation of an effective tool. In this paper we highlight the interpretation and formalization of regulation for building height, overhang and tower ratio. While these rules are specific to a zoning plan in Rotterdam, we believe that the methodology and encountered issues in formalizing the rules, applying the rules on delivered models and integrating various data sources (BIM and GIS specifically) are general to most building codes.

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Standardised data formats and data models are essential for data integration and interoperability, which in turn adds value to data by allowing its reuse in multiple contexts. For this reason, in recent years extensive efforts have been focused on standards development. When representing the built environment, 3D city models and Building Information Models are particularly relevant, and their integration is now required to underpin use cases that cover the full life-cycle of a built asset, including design and planning as well as operations and management, and to support legal applications such as cadastral systems. For those kinds of data, CityGML by the Open Geospatial Consortium and Industry Foundation Classes by buildingSMART are the most popular reference standards. However, many users report, often through informal channels, the difficulties of working with these formats. This paper summarizes the outcomes of the GeoBIM Benchmark 2019, a scientific initiative funded by ISPRS and EuroSDR to collect insights into the most relevant issues encountered in the management of CityGML and IFC within existing software. Alongside data management (import, visualisation, analysis, export) problems, issues of particular consequence in terms of integration relate to georeferencing IFC files and the conversions among the two kinds of formats and models. Thus, the benchmark was designed to explore these tasks in available software. Following analysis of the benchmark results, a key outcome is the impossibility to find clear patterns in the behaviour of tools, which consequently means there is no consistency in the implementation of standards. Although the results could seem disappointing, the criticality in managing these standards as they are was described and this awareness can be the starting point for further research or further standards development. Finally, this project was useful to gather a wide community around this topic, and the discussion about the GeoBIM-related issues was definitely pushed.

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Although the use of location-based data (location coupled with semantic information) within Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and from Earth Observation (e.g. satellite) sources has been long established for decision makers, this has only recently been reflected in the construction sector with a more recent move from Computer Aided Design (CAD) to Building Information Modelling. BIM has opened up an additional source of valuable location-based data, with particular focus on the architecture, structural and engineering detail of both buildings and infrastructure projects. As with most if not all location data, while BIM can be used on its own, major benefits are to be derived from integration with other data sources. When this is done with GIS, the result is known as GeoBIM and although there are some similarities between the two, challenges to integration are both technical and non technical, in particular the need for clear case studies to motivate both developers and senior management. There are synergies to be gained from a multi-national, coordinated approach when addressing these challenges, where participants can benefit from each-others' experience and where the needs of users and the National Mapping and Cadastral Agency (NMCA) perspective underpin the research. This paper summarises final outcomes and findings of the EuroSDR GeoBIM research project, which was set up to provide the required multi-national, user-centric collaborative framework, which had as its overall aim the development of best practice guidelines for GeoBIM, and due to its situation within EuroSDR has an NMCA focus. The paper updates information with regard to GeoBIM projects and maturity in the participant countries, and provides an overview of the two case studies developed.

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This research aims at the study of the (dynamic) relationship between the World Heritage sites and the related human settlements development. Geographical Information Systems (GIS) can be useful to represent the involved information and to analyze such relationship. However, an effective harmonized structure and unique storage of possibly heterogeneous datasets is necessary to enable it. This initial step is the focus of this paper. First, the description of the structure of the related datasets and the assessment of the availability, quality, and consistency of the available information about the Heritage sites and properties is presented. Among those requirements, the quality of the associated spatial information is critical (e.g. kind of shape, accuracy, georeferencing). Second, considering the structure of the available datasets concerning the world heritage, together with the HERILAND research requirements, a global world heritage GIS is designed. The classification and data model to manage the WH list falls within the wider issue of structuring the cultural heritage documentation, involving both the definition of the semantic content and the geometric representation. In order to comply with the important requirement of data interoperability in science and to strengthen the outcomes of the research, some standardized data models and classifications are considered.

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