ECPPM2016 - SemCat: Publishing and Accessing Building Product Information as Linked Data

SemCat: Publishing and Accessing Building Product Information

as Linked Data

ECPPM 2016Limassol, Cyprus

Gudni Gudnason, Innovation Center Iceland,gudni.g@nmi.is

Pieter Pauwels, Ghent University, pipauwel.pauwels@ugent.be

The profile of a product manufacturer

• Small• Regional company• Limited ICT capabilities and resources

95% less than 20 people

paper

html and web portals

CSV, XML, JSON

2D

3D

BIM…

The duties of a product manufacturer

• Producing and selling products– Trade– Business processes

• Supplying precision technical data– Energy performance analysis– Life-cycle cost (LCC)– Life-cycle assessment (LCA)– BIM processes

Linked data?

40% of building cost

?BIM Objects

Tons of questions

• does a BIM object add value to my customers?• for which products in my product range do I need

to have BIM objects?• how much detail will I need to specify and which

software formats do I need to support?• how do I handle different professional and

process information requirements?• will there be a return on my investment and

subsequent increase in sales?

7

product data templates (PDTs)

8

“A product data template is simply a form that contains standardised headings against which manufacturers product information is placed. There is a different template for each type of product.”

Ian Chapman, NBS https://toolkit.thenbs.com/articles/pdts

What is a PDT?

Declaration of Performance (DoP)

Environment Performance Declaration (EPD),

Strategy and approach• Specified and developed by specialists in the industry with

varying relevant backgrounds e.g. professional associations, trade association, interest groups, industry standard bodies, and specifier and product manufacturer organizations

• Common shared view in specifying product types, including properties, naming, units etc. and thus guaranteeing a common set of properties and attributes in accordance with harmonized, national and industry standards and guidelines.

Template Tool

Product Rockwool Density 30 kg/m3

Thickness 100 mmWidth 600 mmLength 1200 mmThermalResistance 1.85 M2 K/WFire Class A1

Product Data

PDF

Product DataTemplate

IFC

COBie

Import

Export

Environmental Product Declaration

Production DB

aim

• a user friendly tool to assist manufacturers in supplying structured data about their products– No need to manage hundreds Excel data sheets– No new PDT

• Simplify the publication process for publishing product data towards prospective customers

How

• Use the appropriate web technologies, • Use agreed PDTs, • Use intuitive interfaces (for manufacturers:

Excel)

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SemCat

SemCat Excel Plug-in

CatalogueManager

TemplateManager

CatalogueRegistration

ExportTemplate

Engine

PDT

PDT

Search EnginesSuppliers

Information Providers

ExportTemplates

Product DataTemplates +

SPie, NBS Import

Publish toRDF & HTML+Microdata

Product CatalogueArchive

Classification tables

Property tables

Unit tables

Manage product catalogue

Import/Export PDT

New Product / Edit Product

Export catalogue

Publication of data

1. as a product catalogue represented in RDF and

2. as product web pages with embedded semantic mark-up in Microdata/RDFa for company and product data.

=> provide open standard multi-lingual semantic product data by using industry established PDTs

SemCat Excel Plug-in

CatalogueManager

TemplateManager

CatalogueRegistration

ExportTemplate

Engine

PDT

PDT

Search EnginesSuppliers

Information Providers

ExportTemplates

Product DataTemplates +

SPie, NBS Import

Publish toRDF & HTML+Microdata

Product CatalogueArchive

26

Conclusion

Gains1. Semantic search with indexes at a much higher detail and property

level2. Facilitating innovative business ventures in linking various construction

data with manufactured product data, 3. suppliers and product distributers’ access to detailed product and

business data e.g. packaging and shipping, 4. supporting BIM object development with external detailed product

data through links to the actual product data by their unique web URI or class of products by classification code,

5. extending the product data by linking to company specific and market data (e.g. suppliers and identifying location, regions, countries where the product is eligible for shipment etc.),

6. making the product data part of the global web of data.

Future work• Synchronization of existing product catalogues with new

versions of PDTs.• The development of a more consistent method to structure

and naming property sets in the properties table is pending. • align with SPie and NBS PDTs • investigate the possibility of using the property classification

table in the OmniclassTM system as part of the properties ontology.

• Formal definitions of enumerations for enumerated properties need to be considered

• support for DoP and EDP publication.

Thank you

Pieter Pauwels, Ghent Universitypipauwel.pauwels@ugent.be

Gudni Gudnason, Innovation Center Iceland,gudni.g@nmi.is