LBDserver - a Federated Ecosystem for Heterogeneous Linked Building Data

As the application of Linked Data technologies in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry gains momentum, prospects for an interdisciplinary, Web-based BIM practice become more and more realistic. Although several modular Linked Building Data (LBD) ontologies have already been developed and interlinked to address specific topics in digital buildings, infrastructures to actually test and use them in an accessible, `BIM-like' fashion, are scarce. In this paper we propose the LBDserver, an extendable web-framework for management of federated, heterogeneous (building) project data. In contrast with current-day centralised Common Data Environments, this decentralised solution is stakeholder-oriented, where disparate project information resides with the stakeholder, to be shared in a fine-grained way with other consortium members, and linked with other heterogeneous datasets on the Web. We combine the Solid initiative for Web decentralisation with the recent industry standard \textit{Information Container for linked Document Delivery} (ICDD), proposing a `federated CDE' infrastructure for serving heterogeneous AEC project datasets in a federated, access-controlled and scalable manner. We validate the proposed framework for completeness using an existing project in Ghent, Belgium.