Overview
The Digital Construction Building Material Ontology (DICM) explicitly defines the necessary relationships between building elements, constructions’ details, materials and their properties. As such, it aims to provide information related to construction details, materials, properties, values and units.
Information about building materials is one of the important aspects to manage a building holistically and in a sustainable way over all phases of its building life cycle. The assignment of material specifications to building elements and sharing these details between stakeholders involved in a project is a decisive task. It will influence the project largely. These properties associated with different layers of building elements are necessary to perform energy, acoustic, lighting, etc. simulations at different stages of the project. Development and analysis of engineering models of a building from its early stages onwards enable performance evaluations and support informed design choices and decisions based on optimization. Seamless data transfer from the BIM model to analytical models considerably increases the efficiency and reduces the inconsistencies, efforts, and time in collaboration scenarios. However, challenges in data sharing activities are persistent in the current workflow for the conversion of BIM models to analytical models. Hence, the DICM ontology was developed to represent construction and material models of building elements and to improve interoperability. The concepts considered in the DICM ontology are represented in the figure below.
The ontology as illustrated in the following figure contains the major classes which are dicm:Material , dicm:MaterialObjectStructure , dicm:MaterialProperty , dicv:BuildingObject , dicv:QuantitativeProperty . Which also have major object properties, those are dicm:hasMaterial , dicm:hasLayer , dicm:hasLayerSet , dicm:hasAdjacentElementLayer , dicm:hasAdjacentLayer , dicm:adjacentElement and dicv:isPropertyFor . Data properties for material data are also defined.
The classes defined in the DICM ontology are shown below.
The entities of the class dice:BuildingObject represent parts of a building, and has a subclass related to the material object structure. The dicm:MaterialObjectStructure is a concept to represent material related information that has material related properties. The classes dicm:Layer , dicm:LayerSet , dicm:Profile , dicm:ProfileSet are the subclasses of dicm:MaterialObjectStructure . The primary focus is on dicm:Layer , and dicm:LayerSet . The dicm:Layer is a single and identifiable part of an element which is constructed of a number of layers (one or more). The dicm:LayerSet is a designation by which materials of an element constructed of a number of material layers is known and through which the relative positioning of individual layers can be expressed.
The class dice:MaterialEntity is equivalent to the BFO class 'material entity'. It has two subclasses. One is dicm:MaterialBatch , which is defined as a collection of homogeneous physical substance that participates in the construction project as the input of a process. Second concept is dicm:Material , which is used to represents homogeneous or inhomogeneous substance that can be used to form elements. It depicts the material assigned to a product. The dicm:Material has 4 subclasses, they are dicm:CompositeMaterial , dicm:InorganicNonMetallicMaterial , dicm:MetallicMaterial , dicm:OrganicMaterial . dicm:MetallicMaterial is to represents the metals which are crystalline and has a structure consists of crystals and grains. Example individuals of this material type are steel or cast iron. dicm:OrganicMaterial is used to define the organic materials such as wood, polymer, or bitumen. dicm:CompositeMaterial represents the constituent materials like concrete, masonry, or reinforced concrete. dicm:InorganicNonMetallicMaterial defines the material types such as glass, or natural stones.
The dicv:QuantitativeProperty is a class that can assume quantitative values. The concept dicm:MaterialProperty subclass of dicv:QunatitativeProperty and is used to represents the different properties of materialThe dicm:MaterialProperty have 9 subclasses, which represents different kinds of material properties:
- dicm:MaterialChemicalProperty – the chemical properties of materials: acidity concentration, alkalinity concentration, etc.
- dicm:MaterialCombustionProperty – the material properties generated due to material combustion: CO content, N2O content, etc.
- dicm:MaterialEnergyProperty – the energy properties of materials: olar refraction index, gas pressure, visible refraction index.
- dicm:MaterialFuelProperty – the fuel properties of the material: carbon content, lower heating value, etc.
- dicm:MaterialHygroscopicProperty – the hygroscopic properties of the material: moisture diffusivity, vapour permeability, etc.
- dicm:MaterialMechanicalProperty – the mechanical properties of materials: young modulus, shear modulus, poisson ratio, etc.
- dicm:MaterialOpticalProperty – the optical properties: visible transmittance, solar transmittance, etc.
- dicm:MaterialPhysicalProperty – the physical properties of materials: density, porosity, molecular weight, etc.
- dicm:MaterialThermalProperty – the thermal properties of materials: specific heat, boiling point, freezing point, etc.