Student: Leonard Höß

Especially in the early design phases it can be helpful to rely on lessons learned from already existing buildings. With this in mind, it would be helpful to send a request to a database with floor plans in order to find similar plans. In this project a program for the setup of a database out of IFC files (Industry Foundation Classes) has been developed.

The process is as follows. First the user has to send with the aid of the client a building model as an IFC file to a webservice, that will save the model on an Open Source BIM Server (www.BIMvie.ws) which computes the geometry of the building. The webservice, the so-called Graph Export Service, derives a room graph and displays it to the user on the corresponding floor plan. Now the user can edit elements and add new ones. The three-dimensional model in the BIM Server is helpful to be able to comprehend programmatic connections. The webservice is saving the floor plan on the ar:searchbox database and the generated graph on the neo4j database. The graph, giving each element has its own ID, displays the information based on story and building nodes.

The AGraphML Download Service can download the existing files in the database as AGraphML files.

The Graph Extractor Client has been tested on its upload and post-editing performance manually with more than 200 IFC files. So far nearly 70% of the nodes and edges where automatically recognized required some degree of Post-editing. In the future manual post-editing can be reduced by improving the attributes for the automatic identification of rooms and connections.