NhuTheHoang

Nhu Hoang · Dec 05, 2010

BIM, GIS, and the Possibilities

Abstract

Geospatial tasks and questions can be solved or answered with the help of Geographic Information System (GIS). Building Information Model (BIM) has been used by various disciplines to design and manage the interior and exterior of buildings. The merger of BIM and GIS would break the limitation of each application individually. This paper will present the status of GIS and BIM as one application or in conjunction with each other.

Introduction

Building Information Management (BIM) and Geographic Information System (GIS) are two terms that might not have had a lot of association in the past, but today these two terms and their associated applications can complement each other rather well for solving complex tasks that might be limited by either BIM or GIS individually. GIS as an application can store, manipulate, and display geographic information well. The observed weakness of GIS in comparison to BIM is its lack of ability to manage a building’s interior data (Deren et. al., 2004). BIM on the other hand has emerged as the application to use for creating, storing, and managing buildings.

BIM and GIS individually will be presented and described initially. The major topic that will be explored in this paper is the current state of BIM and GIS as a whole. The research conducted has shown that there are currently very few applications that support both BIM and GIS together fully. The existing applications that do support BIM and GIS integration are found to be very ad hoc in their operations. Although this is presently the case, recent developments between BIM and GIS have shown a promising outcome for their integration.

Building Information Model

BIM is a class of application that is commonly used in the architecture and construction field for designing and modeling perceived structures. Although the term BIM might be used often to describe an application that is capable of creating and managing a building’s attributes, a clear definition of what BIM technology actually is has not been established (Eastman et al., 2008). In fact, the term BIM was not coined until the early 2000’s by the design, construction, and management community (Jernigan, 2007). The work environment of a BIM application is commonly in three dimensions (the use of length, width, and height), but a BIM should not be defined by the third dimension according to Jernigan (2007). BIM also features ‘intelligent’ in its building model (Elvin, 2007; Eastman, 2008). This means that a BIM should not only have attributes linked to a feature, but the features should be linked to each other as well, allowing scenario and analysis to be run on the building.

The origin of BIM can be linked back to Computer Aided Design (CAD) (Dzambazova et. al., 2009). From an architectural standpoint, CAD is a computer application that allows for computerized drafting of structures. CAD took rise in the 1960’s (Kasik, 2000) and revolutionized how building plans were being produced by architects and designers (Gorman, 1998). In a BIM, different views and documents of the same building will function together, uncommon for older CAD applications. The design-bid-build delivery system currently being used in building construction explains how a BIM application is used in the architecture and construction industry. The benefits of BIM over CAD include the ability to render images and animate a movie in Revit for better visual understanding, and the opportunity to make unlimited plans from one building model.

Geographic Information System

The origin of GIS can be rooted back to Canada in the 1960’s, when the Canadian Government needed a system that could manage land use change (Peuquet and Marble, 1993). Further development of GIS can be attributed to the Harvard Laboratory for Computer Graphics, where Howard Fisher developed Symap, a revolutionary computer application that can process geographic information and produce line maps from a plotter (Chrisman, 2006). The United States Geological Survey defines GIS as “a computer system capable of capturing, storing, analyzing, and displaying geographically referenced information; that is, data identified according to location.” In this paper, GIS will be regarded as a computer application, in the sense that BIM is also just a computer application.

BIM versus GIS

When using GIS in context of BIM, the vector format was the major form of data used between the two applications. Both BIM and GIS should be regarded as more than a simple vector drawing application. While the 3D environment in Revit was found to be exceptional, BIM lacks simple analysis tools that are found integrated inside of a GIS application such as ArcMap.

One of the major conflicts with BIM and GIS is the amount of dimension that each application supports; BIM is in three dimensions, while GIS is two dimensions (Isikdag and Zlatanova, 2009). The current state of CAD and GIS can help explain how BIM and GIS might operate in the future — CAD files can be extracted, transformed, and loaded into ArcGIS quite smoothly. An issue that is a very important topic between BIM and GIS is the governing organization issuing standards for each application. BIM currently has two major organizations: the International Alliance for Interoperability (IAI) and the Building Smart Alliance (BSA). GIS has the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) which runs the OpenGIS standards, supported by major GIS vendors such as ESRI.

BIM and GIS: An Outlook of Possibility

Building Information Spatial Data Model (BISDM) has been a well documented process of GIS and BIM in one application by ESRI and Penobscotbay. Because BISDM is developed on a GIS platform, it will have the ability to work on both the large scale (country, state, and city) that GIS is accustomed to while being able to zoom in to the small scale (building, room, furniture) that BIM provides. In a building information management pilot, BISDM associated software was used to store and process building data from the Smithsonian Institution in Panama (Kendra et al., 2009).

GIS and BIM integration is believed to be able to help with emergency response organizations by providing crucial data in one application. Isikdag (2008) and colleagues proposed the integration of BIM data into GIS software for fire fighters to better respond to a burning building. Designers are another group that can benefit from GIS and BIM incorporation. At the GeoDesign Summit in 2010, Karen Hanna pointed out that once BIM is more integrated inside of GIS, more individuals from different disciplines can congregate, allowing the opportunity for better decision making.

Conclusion

After reviewing literature on both BIM and GIS it was found that they both share many similar traits. From a user standpoint, both GIS and BIM can be regarded as graphic applications that allow users to link attributes to specific objects in the geometry. Currently there are several major distinctions between BIM and GIS applications. BIM lacks spatial context that is critical to the processing ability of a GIS. Also, the lack of integrated processing and analytical tools within BIM was found to be a major disadvantage to the application compared to the robust set of tools found in current GIS applications.

Ideally BIM and GIS would work in conjunction with each other to answer complex questions that require data from both interior and exterior spaces. The two major problems with compatibility are file formats and dimensionality. The popular solution at the moment is to convert the 3D file back to 2D, eliminating the height factor of the building. The progress being made between BIM and GIS was found to be very GIS oriented. The marriage of BIM and GIS is still in its infant stage, but there are already questions that BIM and GIS can answer as a whole — now it is just a matter of time for them to become one seamless application.

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