Abstract

Ontologies have been applied as knowledge representation in di erent domains, including intelligent building management. One of the challenges in using ontologies is the population with building specic information, such as the building elements and the energy consuming devices. The population usually has to be done manually by analysis and interpreting the building drawings, thus it requires extensive work. This is due to the lack of semantic information in the existing building construction drawings, which only contain geometrical information. However, it is possible to understand the semantics of the drawings, if the knowledge in interpreting the semantics of the symbols, shapes and other geometric information is present. This paper introduces a tool to extract the semantic information from CAD drawings and populate the ontology using the extracted semantic information in a semi-automatic way. The drawing primitives from CAD les are used to perform the pattern matching and classication algorithms to extract the semantic information. The resulting semantic information is then mapped to the corresponding ontology classes of a T-Box ontology. Finally individuals of the corresponding classes are created to populate the ontology and their geometric properties like world coordinate position and bounding box are set.