DRUMBEAT - Web of Building Data Platform

Web of Building Data

Web of Building Data (WoBD) technologies enable the sharing of building data among the diverse stakeholders over a construction lifecycle, such as regulatory authorities, urban planners, emergency services, architects, designers, contractors, fabricators, product vendors, facility managers, maintenance persons, owners, residents, and visitors.

Different types of data can be published and accessed on the Web using the standard Web of Data technologies (URI, HTTP, RDF, OWL, JSON-LD, SPARQL). Moreover, data can be integrated at the objects-level across different datasets and domains by linking objects with each other. WoBD allows a granular, object-level access to online and up-to-date building data.

The development of the technologies is coordinated by the Linked Data Working Group at buildingSmart. The main result of its work is the ifcOWL ontology that allows the representation of BIM models, represented in the IFC standard, in a manner that they can be published on the Web and accessed granularly, one object at a time.

DRUMBEAT Platform

DRUMBEAT platform is an open-source, proof-of-concept implementation of WoBD. It can be used through a REST API and it contains an converter that translates all uploaded IFC models into RDF. Many practical issues have been addressed during its development, concerning the organization and description of published data, URI design for objects, publication and management of links, and the users' access to links

The source code of the platform is available from Github.