The ARTIFACT (Advanced Research, Techniques, and Informatics for Future Advantages
in Construction Technology) project is a collaborative endeavor between civil engineering
domain experts and database management specialists at the University of British Columbia.
Its goal is to develop novel technology to support the task of extracting all manners of
construction information from their native applications and integrating them to more
effectively support Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) practitioners in making
critical decisions for large construction projects.
To date, the team has focused their efforts on building design data created and stored in
Autodesk Revit. Jiemin Zhang, a former graduate student in the
DMM lab,
has accomplished the task of
extracting non-spatial attribute data for components in a Revit design document into ifcXML and
has built a query application that can support domain experts in answering more complicated
design questions using this information. However, the current application is unable to
support queries of a spatial nature. My work is intended to fill this gap. I will
integrate the previously extracted non-spatial attribute data with the spatial data that we have
recently extracted from Revit and then incorporate the domain-relevant spatial queries identified
by our partners in the civil engineering department into the existing query application.
More details can be found in my
graduate thesis proposal.
Madhav N., J. Zhang, A. Webster, S. Staub-French, R. Pottinger, and M. Lawrence:
Querying IFC-based Building Information Models to Support Construction Management Functions.
Construction Research Congress, 2009.
Madhav N., S. Staub-French, J. Zhang, M. Lawrence and R. Pottinger:
Deriving Construction Features from an IFC Model.
CSCE 2008 Annual Conference.
