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Introduction
Building information modeling (BIM) is an emerging technological and procedural shift within the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry. While there were attempts to popularize the term (Laiserin, 2002) and craft a multi-vendor consensus around it (Laiserin, 2003), the core nomenclature of building information had been coined at least 14 years earlier and the concept or approach had been established for more than 16 years before that time. Recently, both the concept and nomenclature of building information models (BIM) and building information modeling have engaged many industry professionals. The term “BIM” has been intentionally and consistently used to describe an activity (meaning building information modeling), rather than an object (building information model) (Eastman et al., 2008), which reflects the belief that BIM is not a software but a human activity that ultimately involves broad process changes in construction. Liu et al. (2011) described BIM from two different perspectives: modeling and application. On one hand, BIM is building information modeling, based on a three-dimensional digital technology that integrates the construction project and related information of graphical engineering models, and contains physical engineering properties and functional properties and its related project life-cycle information. On the other, BIM is a building information model that is fully digital, dynamic and can add all kinds of project information in a project life cycle freely to meet any kind of demand, and it supports various operations of a construction project.
There have been different attempts within the AEC industries to define building (construction) information model (BIM). International standards define BIM as “shared digital representation of physical and functional characteristics of any built object […] which forms a reliable basis for decisions” [ISO Standard, ISO 29481-1:2010(E), 2010]; it originates from product models (Borrmann and Rank, 2009; Cerovsek, 2011) that are widely applied in the petrochemical, automotive or shipbuilding industry (Wong and Yang, 2010; Eastman et al., 2011). BIM represents real buildings virtually over the whole life cycle as semantically enriched, consistent and digital building models (Tang et al., 2010; Eastman et al., 2011; Watson, 2011). It is realized with an object-oriented software and consists of parametric objects representing building components (Lee et al., 2006; Cerovsek, 2011; Nicolle and Cruz, 2011). Objects may have geometric or non-geometric...