Semiautomatic Generation of Code Ontology Using ifcOWL in Compliance Checking

Code compliance checking is a very important step in engineering construction, but most of code compliance checking relies on manual review at present. With the development of semantic web technology, ontology can be used to represent code information and check the code automatically. However, code ontology is established manually by researchers who have sufficient domain knowledge, in which it is easy to cause poor hierarchical structure of classes. It is also possible for code ontology not being suitable for compliance check. This paper proposes a semiautomatic construction method of railway code ontology based on ifcOWL. The railway code ontology is developed by converting ifcOWL which extends semantic information of railway code. This method can ensure the completeness of the hierarchical relationship of the classes in code ontology with good scalability, which makes use of taxonomy in ifcOWL. The establishment of ontology is divided into two processes with low coupling, namely, extension and conversion, which reduces the domain knowledge requirements of the researchers. Finally, a practical specification is selected to generate a code ontology that achieves some clauses checking.