Towards More Practical BIM/GIS Integration

Dear Colleagues,

The integration of building information modelling (BIM) and geographic information systems (GIS) contributes to digital twins and, more broadly, the Smart City. Over the last fifteen years, this topic has been investigated by researchers from various fields at both the fundamental data level and the higher application level.

The data-level integration primarily deals with two tasks, i.e., geometry conversion and semantics transfer. In terms of geometry conversion, early studies focused on the conversion of IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) into CityGML (City Geography Markup Language), GML (Geography Markup Language), or shapefile, while Semantic Web techniques, such as resource description framework (RDF), were used to deal with the semantics.

In recent years, more technologies and data standards have become available, such as the labelled property graph (LPG)-based graph database, 3D tiles, Indexed 3D Scene Layer (I3S), and the new CityGML 3.0. These new, emerging technologies, as well as those in relevant areas such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Mixed Reality (MR), introduce new opportunities to deal with practical problems. Therefore, the purpose of this Special Issue is to showcase the use of BIM/GIS integration, in conjunction with other technologies, in solving practical problems relating to, but not limited to, the following:

• Digital twin;
• Smart city;
• Emergency response, e.g., indoor/outdoor route planning;
• Natural hazard, e.g., flood, landslide;
• Digital building permit;
• Infrastructure management, e.g., railway, road, and dam;
• Indoor/outdoor navigation;
• Infrastructure operation and maintenance;
• City information modelling.

Dr. Junxiang Zhu
Dr. Ran Wei
Dr. Yi Tan
Dr. Mengtian Yin
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• BIM/GIS integration
• semantic web
• graph theory
• labelled property graph
• infrastructure management
• building permit
• smart city
• digital twin