HBIM-GIS Integration: From IFC to CityGML Standard for Damaged Cultural Heritage in a Multiscale 3D GIS

TLDR

The San Lorenzo Church in Norcia, Italy, suffered extensive earthquake damage, creating an urgent need to update its documentation for protection and conservation. This study aims to test the interoperability of a Historic Building Information Modeling (HBIM) model within a 3D GIS environment to support multiscale cultural heritage analysis. The authors evaluated technical and semantic interoperability by importing the HBIM model into ArcGIS Pro and QGIS, and used Feature Manipulation Engine to convert IFC data to GML, producing a unified CityGML‑standard model. The integration process was assessed for loss of geometric and informational data, which was quantified and evaluated.

Abstract

This study describes the technical-systemic and conceptual-informative interoperability tests for the integration of a Historic Building Information Modeling (HBIM) model in a 3D Geographic Information System (GIS) environment aimed to provide complete and useful documentation for multiscale analyses on cultural heritage particularly exposed to risks. The case study of the San Lorenzo Church in Norcia (Italy) has been chosen given the urgent need to update the existing documentation for its protection and conservation issues, due to the extensive damage suffered after the series of earthquakes that occurred in central Italy starting from summer 2016. Different tests to evaluate two levels of conceptual interoperability (technical and semantic) when importing the HBIM model into a GIS environment were performed, whether with commercial software or with open source ones (ArcGIS Pro and QGIS, respectively). A data integration platform (Feature Manipulation Engine, FME) has been used for converting the IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) data format into the GML (Geography Markup Language) format, in order to obtain a unique and unified model and vocabulary for the 3D GIS project, structured with different levels of detail, according to CityGML standard. Finally, as HBIM-GIS integration is considered, the loss of geometric and informative data has been taken into account and evaluated.