However, this integration suffers from a lack of interoperability across the geospatial and BIM domains. The integration of BIM and geospatial analyses can offer substantial benefits to manage the planning process during the design and preconstruction stages.

Despite the successful applications of BIM in the design and construction stages, the use of BIM for preconstruction planning has not gained wide acceptance as in other project phases. Since the early 2000s, building information modeling (BIM) has been used through the entire project life cycle to facilitate effective project collaboration and integration of data to support project activities. Thus, the proposed framework utilizes the capabilities of semantic web and query technologies to transform the query results to an XML representation of IFC data. Originality/value – Currently, the results of semantic web queries are not supported by BIM authoring tools. The developed framework for representing IFC-compatible outputs allows BIM users to query and access building data at any time over the web from data providers. Findings – The research findings indicate that semantic web technology can be used, accurately and with minimal human intervention, to maintain semantic-level information when transforming information between web-based and BIM formats. The resulting ifcXML document is validated with an XML schema validating parser and then loaded into a building information modeling (BIM) authoring tool. For query processing, the proposed framework implements a set of predefined query mappings between the source schema and a corresponding IFC output schema. Then, a mapping structure is defined and used to translate and fill all query results into an ifcXML document. Using the concepts and relationships in an IFC schema, the authors first develop an ontology to specify an equivalent IFC entity in the query results. Design/methodology/approach – This paper provides a framework to translate semantic web query results into the XML representations of IFC schema and data. Given the distributed, semantically heterogeneous data sources, the problem is to retrieve information accurately and with minimal human intervention by considering their semantic descriptions. The subject of interoperability has received considerable attention in the construction literature in recent years. Purpose – This paper aims to develop a framework to represent semantic web query results as Industry Foundation Class (IFC) building models.

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