Municipalities invest a lot of time and person-hours into manual building permit checks. With the increase in computational power and the use of Building Information Models (BIM) in the building design life cycle, several municipalities are investing in automating these checks using BIM and geo-data sets. However, few examples exist of tools effectively using geo-information with BIM. In order to address this gap, a project was developed with the municipality of Rotterdam (NL). In a previous phase, a tool was implemented, able to analyse the BIM data to extract the needed information for a few representative regulations. In order to extend and improve the previously developed tool, a web-based interface is now implemented and geo-data sets are integrated to the process allowing more powerful GeoBIM analysis. Three checks using both BIM and GIS data were implemented and tested: (i) The parcel limit check evaluates if the building's footprint derived from BIM falls within the parcel limit provided from the municipalities' parcel data sets. (ii) The height check evaluates the maximum building's relative height to the road's height. Finally, (iii) the road overhang check detects neighbouring roads to the parcel and evaluates the admissible overhang over that road. This paper presents these developments, including the type of input data that is needed for the checks, the tools for the three new GeoBIM checks (parcel limit check, height check, road overhang check) and the implementation in the web-based tool.

In this paper, we present our workflow to automatically reconstruct three-dimensional (3D) building models based on two-dimensional building polygons and a lidar point cloud. The workflow generates models at different levels of detail (LoDs) to support data require-ments of different applications from one consistent source. Specific attention has been paid to make the workflow robust to quickly run a new iteration in case of improvements in an algorithm or in case new input data become available. The quality of the reconstructed data highly depends on the quality of the input data and is monitored in several steps of the process. A 3D viewer has been developed to view and download the openly available 3D data at different LoDs in different formats. The workflow has been applied to all 10 million buildings of the Netherlands. The 3D ser-vice will be updated after new input data becomes available.

Fully automated reconstruction of high-detail building models on a national scale is challenging. It raises a set of problems that are seldom found when processing smaller areas, single cities. Often there is no reference, ground truth available to evaluate the quality of the reconstructed models. Therefore, only relative quality metrics are computed, comparing the models to the source data sets. In the paper we present a set of relative quality metrics that we use for assessing the quality of 3D building models, that were reconstructed in a fully automated process, in Levels of Detail 1.2, 1.3, 2.2 for the whole of the Netherlands. The source data sets for the reconstruction are the Dutch Building and Address Register (BAG) and the National Height Model (AHN). The quality assessment is done by comparing the building models to these two data sources. The work presented in this paper lays the foundation for future research on the quality control and management of automated building reconstruction. Additionally, it serves as an important step in our ongoing effort for a fully automated building reconstruction method of high-detail, high-quality models.

Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), the buildingSMART open standard for BIM, is underused with respect to its promising potential, since, according to the experience of practitioners and researchers working with BIM, issues in the standard’s implementation and use prevent its effective use. Nevertheless, a systematic investigation of these issues has never been carried out, and there is thus insufficient evidence for tackling the problems. The GeoBIM benchmark project is aimed at finding such evidence by involving external volunteers, reporting on various aspects of the behavior of tools (geometry, semantics, georeferencing, functionalities), analyzed and described in this article. Interestingly, different IFC software programs with the same standardized data sets yield inconsistent results, with few detectable common patterns, and significant issues are found in their support of the standard, probably due to the very high complexity of the standard data model. A companion article (Part II) describes the results of the benchmark related to CityGML, the counterpart of IFC within geoinformation.

OGC CityGML is an open standard for 3D city models intended to foster interoperability and support various applications. However, through our practical experience and discussions with practitioners, we have noticed several problems related to the implementation of the standard and the use of standardized data. Nevertheless, a systematic investigation of these issues has never been carried out, and there is thus insufficient evidence for tackling the problems. The GeoBIM benchmark project is aimed at finding such evidence by involving external volunteers, reporting on various aspects of the behavior of tools (geometry, semantics, georeferencing, functionalities), analyzed and described in this article. This study explicitly pointed out the critical points embedded in the format as an evidence base for future development. A companion article (Part I) describes the results of the benchmark related to IFC, the counterpart of CityGML within building information modeling.