Conservation-oriented hbim. The bimexplorer web tool

The application of (H)BIM within the domain of Architectural Historical Heritage has huge potential that can be even exploited within the restoration domain. The work presents a novel approach to solve the widespread interoperability issue related to the data enrichment in BIM environment, by developing and testing a web tool based on a specific workflow experienced choosing as the case study a Romanic church in Portonovo, Ancona, Italy. Following the need to make the data, organized in a BIM environment, usable for the different actors involved in the restoration phase, we have created a pipeline that take advantage of BIM existing platforms and semantic-web technologies, enabling the end user to query a repository composed of semantically structured data. The pipeline of work consists in four major steps: i) modelling an ontology with the main information needs for the domain of interest, providing a data structure that can be leveraged to inform the data-enrichment phase and, later, to meaningfully query the data; ii) data enrichment, by creating a set of shared parameters reflecting the properties in our domain ontology; iii) structuring data in a machine-readable format (through a data conversion) to represent the domain (ontology) and analyse data of specific buildings respectively; iv) development of a demonstrative data exploration web application based on the faceted browsing paradigm and allowing to exploit both structured metadata and 3D visualization. The application can be configured by a domain expert to reflect a given domain ontology, and used by an operator to query and explore the data in a more efficient and reliable way. With the proposed solution the analysis of data can be reused together with the 3D model, providing the end-user with a non proprietary tool; in this way, the planned maintenance or the restoration project became more collaborative and interactive, optimizing the whole process of HBIM data collection.