Open data standards and BIM on the cloud

This chapter discusses the current and emerging state of open data infrastructure supporting storage, encoding, transmission and exchange of building information, with the goal of supporting cloud-based networks of information systems that are able to communicate with each other. These capabilities point the way to future distributed communication of building geometry, product data, properties, and so forth across the design, building and operate life cycle of a building. The chapter describes the existing state of building data standards, focused on the object model, schemas and geometric descriptions currently existing in the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) open data standard. Core principles of this existing standard are briefly described, including object and relationship modelling, geometry and metadata class structure, and existing encodings using SPF, XML, JSON and RDF. We hereby rely on some of the background and de-tailed methods outlined in earlier chapters and try to point out promising new developments that seek to migrate these existing building data conventions to the emerging paradigms of data on the cloud. Based on this background, we present three data modelling approaches: backwards-compatible JSON, optimised JSON, and JSON-LD. JSON is simply used here as an example serialisation format; choices made in RDF, XML and SPF are very similar. Short samples are given for illustration throughout the chapter, and the chapter finally shows an example project in Rhino Grasshopper that indicates what data service architecture is possible for supporting connected web services using the described representation formats.