HBIM Modeling from the Surface Mesh and Its Extended Capability of Knowledge Representation

Built heritage has been documented by reality-based modeling for geometric description and by ontology for knowledge management. The current challenge still involves the extraction of geometric primitives and the establishment of their connection to heterogeneous knowledge. As a recently developed 3D information modeling environment, building information modeling (BIM) entails both graphical and non-graphical aspects of the entire building, which has been increasingly applied to heritage documentation and generates a new issue of heritage/historic BIM (HBIM). However, HBIM needs to additionally deal with the heterogeneity of geometric shape and semantic knowledge of the heritage object. This paper developed a new mesh-to-HBIM modeling workflow and an integrated BIM management system to connect HBIM elements and historical knowledge. Using the St-Pierre-le-Jeune Church, Strasbourg, France as a case study, this project employs Autodesk Revit as a BIM environment and Dynamo, a built-in visual programming tool of Revit, to extend the new HBIM functions. The mesh-to-HBIM process segments the surface mesh, thickens the triangle mesh to 3D volume, and transfers the primitives to BIM elements. The obtained HBIM is then converted to the ontology model to enrich the heterogeneous knowledge. Finally, HBIM geometric elements and ontology semantic knowledge is joined in a unified BIM environment. By extending the capability of the BIM platform, the HBIM modeling process can be conducted in a time-saving way, and the obtained HBIM is a semantic model with object-oriented knowledge.