Note: this project is no longer actively maintained. It is archived and read-only. For more information about IFC, please contact BuildingSMART International.
IFCtoRDF is a set of reusable Java components that allows to parse IFC-SPF files and convert them into RDF graphs. This library supports the conversion of ifc-spf files according to the schemas available at https://technical.buildingsmart.org/standards/ifc/ifc-schema-specifications/, namely:
- IFC2X3_TC1
- IFC4_ADD1
- IFC4_ADD2
- IFC4_ADD2_TC1
- IFC4x1
- IFC4
- IFC4x3_RC1
If you simply want to run your computer on your device, you are advised to download
- the shaded executable JAR archive from the GitHub Release folder at https://github.com/pipauwel/IFCtoRDF/releases; or
- the shaded executable JAR archive from the Maven Central repository at https://search.maven.org/artifact/com.github.pipauwel/IFCtoRDF
Both are identical, and include all necessary dependencies to be able to run the code out of the box.
This code does not have a Graphical User Interface (GUI). Run any one of the following commands in a command line interface (CLI) to generate an RDF graph in TTL format for the provided IFC-SPF files. These commands allow converting all ifc files in a directory (--dir flag) or just one specific file (no --dir flag), with a user-specific URI specified or not (--baseURI flag).
java -jar IFCtoRDF-0.4-SNAPSHOT-shaded.jar --baseURI https://www.myownwebspace.be/ --dir path/to/folder/
java -jar IFCtoRDF-0.4-SNAPSHOT-shaded.jar --dir path/to/folder/
java -jar IFCtoRDF-0.4-SNAPSHOT-shaded.jar path/to/file.ifc path/to/file.ttl
java -jar IFCtoRDF-0.4-SNAPSHOT-shaded.jar --baseURI http://www.test.be/ path/to/file.ifc path/to/file.ttl
The conversion process can be memory-intensive. 400MB files are fully loaded in memory, often twice, because of the use of a Jena RDF library, not to mention the IFC OWL ontology. It is therefore to reserve a sufficient amount of RAM memory to this Java process. You can do this by explicitly stating the optimal Java heap space to be used with the -Xmx and -Xms flags. For example, 8GB RAM is associated to this process in the below command.
java -Xmx8g -Xms8g -jar IFCtoRDF-0.4-SNAPSHOT-shaded.jar --baseURI https://www.myownwebspace.be/ --dir path/to/folder/
This Java code is managed using Maven. If you plan to re-use this code, you are advised to do this through maven. The code is published as a Maven module in Maven Central (https://search.maven.org/artifact/com.github.pipauwel/IFCtoRDF). Therefore, you can directly include and use this code by adding the following lines to your pom.xml file.
<dependency>
<groupId>com.github.pipauwel</groupId>
<artifactId>IFCtoRDF</artifactId>
<version>0.4</version>
</dependency>
The output RDF graphs follow the ifcOWL ontology, of which a number of versions are available:
- https://standards.buildingsmart.org/IFC/DEV/IFC2x3/FINAL/OWL/
- https://standards.buildingsmart.org/IFC/DEV/IFC2x3/TC1/OWL/
- https://standards.buildingsmart.org/IFC/DEV/IFC4/ADD1/OWL/
- https://standards.buildingsmart.org/IFC/DEV/IFC4/ADD2/OWL/
- https://standards.buildingsmart.org/IFC/DEV/IFC4/ADD2_TC1/OWL/
- https://standards.buildingsmart.org/IFC/DEV/IFC4/FINAL/OWL/
- https://standards.buildingsmart.org/IFC/DEV/IFC4_1/OWL/
Each of these ontologies rely on the EXPRESS and LIST ontologies:
Through maven, this code depends primarily on:
- jena-core v3.1.1
- jena-arq v3.1.1
- EXPRESStoOWL v0.4
All source code is accessible through the EXPRESStoOWL GitHub repository in the master branch. Anyone is free to fork the repository, make changes, and potentially suggest updates and changes through Git pull requests.
You will need Java JDK and Maven installed. After downloading the code from the Github repository, you need to run the below command to compile the code and download all necessary maven dependencies:
mvn compile
Issues can be posted in https://github.com/pipauwel/IFCtoRDF/issues.
A change log is available at CHANGES.md.
The API Documentation is very limited, yet it is available at: https://pipauwel.github.io/IFCtoRDF/0.4/
Previous versions are available:
- Version 0.3 (1 Aug. 2019): https://github.com/pipauwel/IFCtoRDF/releases/tag/IFCtoRDF-0.3
- Version 0.2 (26 Feb. 2018): https://github.com/pipauwel/IFCtoRDF/releases/tag/IFCtoRDF-0.2
- Version 0.1 (8 Jun. 2017): https://github.com/pipauwel/IFCtoRDF/releases/tag/IFCtoRDF-0.1
This repository also contains the test files used for this code, including the expected logs. These files are used for the maven unit testing and can hence be found in the src/test folder. These are small samples, but they cover most of the code and most of the most common cases in IFC-SPFF files used in the construction industry.
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.
See License details at LICENSE.
Want to know more? Contact:
Pieter Pauwels
Eindhoven University of Technology
[email protected]