Ontologies as the Key for Common Understanding of Infrastructure Assets

Abstract

Infrastructure assets around the world are managed using Infrastructure Asset Management Systems (IAMSs). Although powerful and comprehensive, these systems poorly describe the asset’s geometry. Building Information Models (BIMs) are recently recognized as a tool to close this information gap. In order to achieve the full compatibility between BIM and various IAMSs, certain obstacles need to be overcome. Classification and representation of entities their properties, and relationships between them, in short, the ontologies underlying IAMS vary substantially between different National Road Authorities. This includes but is not limited to the decomposition of assets and naming conventions, i.e., taxono-my and semantics. In the context of IAMSs, ontologies are hierarchically organized catalogues of concepts that abstract the infrastructure assets, specifying their properties and in-terrelations. Although every IAMS has a catalogue, or a dictionary, of the asset management terminology, not every catalog can be perceived as an ontology. Every dictionary, however, can be converted to the ontology. This paper converts two of such dictionaries (the Serbian and the Swiss one) into ontologies. The structure and the content of both dictionaries is analyzed. After-ward, the process of mapping each dictionary into ontology is described. Finally, the two ontologies are used to demonstrate how one BIM model can be differently incorporated in two different IAMSs