An Assessment of Paths for Transforming IFC to Shapefile for Integration of BIM and GIS

© 2018 IEEE. Building Information Modelling (BIM) could provide detailed 3D building models to Geographic Information Systems (GISs) for the emerging studies in smart cities/digital cities. During information exchange, Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) containing rich building information is the mos...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Zhu, J., Wang, P., Wang, Xiangyu
Format: Conference Paper
Published: 2018
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/74010
_version_ 1848763156079312896
author Zhu, J.
Wang, P.
Wang, Xiangyu
author_facet Zhu, J.
Wang, P.
Wang, Xiangyu
author_sort Zhu, J.
building Curtin Institutional Repository
collection Online Access
description © 2018 IEEE. Building Information Modelling (BIM) could provide detailed 3D building models to Geographic Information Systems (GISs) for the emerging studies in smart cities/digital cities. During information exchange, Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) containing rich building information is the most used data format in BIM. However, GIS does not the capacity to directly consume the data in IFC due to data incompatibility between the two systems. Consequently, IFC files have to be transformed into a format that is accessible to GIS. Shapefile is one of them, given its popularity in geospatial science. This study tests the different formats and methods for transforming IFC to shapefile, assesses their performance, in order to offer a ranking, from which better decisions could be made when choosing an appropriate intermediate data format. The results show direct transformation from IFC to shapefile retained the most geometry and semantic information. If the direct transformation method does not work in some cases, 3DS, VRML, or SKP could be used as alternatives to retain most of the information, while DWG, DXF, KML, and KMZ should not be considered due to their poor performance in the test.
first_indexed 2025-11-14T10:58:59Z
format Conference Paper
id curtin-20.500.11937-74010
institution Curtin University Malaysia
institution_category Local University
last_indexed 2025-11-14T10:58:59Z
publishDate 2018
recordtype eprints
repository_type Digital Repository
spelling curtin-20.500.11937-740102019-02-19T04:28:01Z An Assessment of Paths for Transforming IFC to Shapefile for Integration of BIM and GIS Zhu, J. Wang, P. Wang, Xiangyu © 2018 IEEE. Building Information Modelling (BIM) could provide detailed 3D building models to Geographic Information Systems (GISs) for the emerging studies in smart cities/digital cities. During information exchange, Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) containing rich building information is the most used data format in BIM. However, GIS does not the capacity to directly consume the data in IFC due to data incompatibility between the two systems. Consequently, IFC files have to be transformed into a format that is accessible to GIS. Shapefile is one of them, given its popularity in geospatial science. This study tests the different formats and methods for transforming IFC to shapefile, assesses their performance, in order to offer a ranking, from which better decisions could be made when choosing an appropriate intermediate data format. The results show direct transformation from IFC to shapefile retained the most geometry and semantic information. If the direct transformation method does not work in some cases, 3DS, VRML, or SKP could be used as alternatives to retain most of the information, while DWG, DXF, KML, and KMZ should not be considered due to their poor performance in the test. 2018 Conference Paper http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/74010 10.1109/GEOINFORMATICS.2018.8557099 restricted
spellingShingle Zhu, J.
Wang, P.
Wang, Xiangyu
An Assessment of Paths for Transforming IFC to Shapefile for Integration of BIM and GIS
title An Assessment of Paths for Transforming IFC to Shapefile for Integration of BIM and GIS
title_full An Assessment of Paths for Transforming IFC to Shapefile for Integration of BIM and GIS
title_fullStr An Assessment of Paths for Transforming IFC to Shapefile for Integration of BIM and GIS
title_full_unstemmed An Assessment of Paths for Transforming IFC to Shapefile for Integration of BIM and GIS
title_short An Assessment of Paths for Transforming IFC to Shapefile for Integration of BIM and GIS
title_sort assessment of paths for transforming ifc to shapefile for integration of bim and gis
url http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/74010