Research On Ontology-based Semantic Retrieval Of Construction Domain Under BIM Environment

The process from construction projects’conceptual design to operation and maintenance is very complex, so a large number of different forms of construction information are generated during a construction project’s whole lifecycle. And due to the uncertain and ambiguous external and internal environment of construction project, the information of previous projects is a very precious resource and reference for effective construction project management. So it is an important issue in construction domain to facilitate project participants to query required information of previous projects among numerous project documents efficiently. At present, information retrieval in construction domain is still based on the keywords and this method cannot comprehend and analyze data from concept level, which generates a lot of redundant information.Moreover, the emerging Building Information Modelling (BIM) has brought greater challenge to construction information management. BIM is an integration platform of construction project information, so realizing the integration between BIM and the other information platforms is a research focus in construction domain.In view of the above two aspects, this paper introduces ontology as the modeling approach for information exchange and puts forward a semantic retrieval method based on ontology for construction project management. Then this paper realizes the integration between ontology based semantic retrieval system and BIM and designs an ontology based semantic retrieval system under BIM environment.Firstly, this paper studies how to adopt seven footwork modeling method and METHODOLOGY method to construct construction domain ontology and how to achieve ontology based semantic retrieval which is realized by four steps, i.e., segmentation processing, eigenvalue extraction and weight calculation, query expansion and similarity calculation. Then construction documents’retrieval from knowledge level is realized and an example is presented to validate this method.Secondly, this paper introduces the realization platforms of this construction domain ontology based semantic retrieval system under BIM environment, designs a construction domain ontology based semantic retrieval system and analyzes every module of this system. Then base on this system, this paper designs a system integrating BIM and document information retrieval, which lays foundation for the development of prototype system.Finally, taking construction project risk management as an example, this paper constructs a risk management domain ontology and then conducts query expansion experiment and retrieval and ranking experiment base on this ontology. Then this paper analyzes and verifies the feasibility of the construction domain ontology based semantic retrieval integration system under BIM environment, which provides support for further system development.