BIM and HBIM: Standardisation and interoperability

Dear Colleagues,

In recent years, 3D models of cities and their buildings, including geometric and semantic contents, have been largely acknowledged as a powerful tool for many research fields and applications (building and infrastructure design, restoration support, urban planning, asset management, and so on). BIM (building information models), the development of HBIM (historical BIM) is also of topical relevance, particularly, when historical architectural assets are involved.

The great development (in number and functionalities) of BIM systems and tools, leads to relevant questions about how to actually enhance their flexibility, in order to make their exchange, maintenance, and re-usability effective (e.g., to integrate the urban mapping products, in which buildings play a major role).

The use of open standards is, obviously, a good choice, but many issues surrounding open standards remain unresolved. Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) by buildingSMART is the affirmed open standard for managing BIMs. However, many other standards exist for the same objects, concerning the buildings and their context (OGC CityGML, gbXML, the INSPIRE data model, and national standards are some examples). Their effective integration has been the topic of many studies, using different approaches (manual, mapping approaches, ontologies, and many more), but there has been no definitive solution.

Moreover, other 3D models and spatial products are based on mapping standards and derive from survey and modeling methods of a different nature (from image and range based acquisitions, remote sensing, lidar, different modeling techniques, etc.). Therefore, their interoperability with BIM can sometimes be very limited.

It is necessary to solve the problems of interoperability and standardization, in order to build efficient and useful BIMs and HBIMs, which can effectively take advantage of the many available technologies for their management.

This Special Issue of the journal Applied Sciences, “BIM and HBIM, Standardization and Interoperability” will outline how the proposed solutions for interoperability and the use of standards can bring advantages for BIM and HBIM applications (including design and construction projects, use of BIM in urban space planning, historical built heritage documentation, conservation projects, and asset management, together with the projects that address the emerging problems of our era: lower energy consumptions, smart networking, logistics, guide to choices and strategies for conservation, enhancing resilience, and so on).

Prof. Dr. Antonia Spano'
Dr. Francesca Noardo
Dr. Margarita Kokla
Guest Editors

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• BIM /HBIM models derived from points clouds
• data acquisition and processing in BIM and HBIM
• rapid digitalization
• model accuracy
• informative contents: level of details (LOD), level of information (LOI), level of development
• on-site data acquisition and management for BIM/HBIM
• HBIM for conservation and restoration contexts
• object libraries
• models inventory
• semantics for BIM/HBIM
• openBIM
• GeoDB BIM
• standardization and interoperability in BIM/HBIM
• geoBIM
• BIM applications
• ontologies
• semantics
• open standards