Don’t Shoehorn, but Link Compliance Checking Data

Wouldn’t it be great if we could automatically check whether a Building Information Model (BIM) complies with all the relevant building regulations? Despite a plethora of motivations and a long history of research, the Automated Compliance Checking (ACC) problem is far from solved. We argue that a general solution to ACC may not be feasible based on three fundamental difficulties: (1) semantic parsing of regulatory texts, (2) a mismatch in requirements for representing a building project and representing the building elements that ACC rules refer to, and (3) the lack of a strategy to align ACC rules to each other and to building representations. We identify the need for tools that support the use building regulations for their diverse group of users, e.g., not only during Compliance Checking. Our conclusion is that a Linked Data approach is particularly suited to the development of such support tools.