Presentation at the 11th European Conference on Product and Process Modelling (2016), in Limassol, Cyprus. Presentation and article are authored by Gudni Gundason and Pieter Pauwels.

1. SemCat: Publishing and Accessing
Building Product Information
as Linked Data
ECPPM 2016
Limassol, Cyprus
Gudni Gudnason, Innovation Center Iceland,
gudni.g@nmi.is
Pieter Pauwels, Ghent University,
pipauwel.pauwels@ugent.be

2. The profile of a product manufacturer
• Small
• Regional company
• Limited ICT capabilities and resources
95% less than 20 people

3. paper
html and web portals
CSV, XML, JSON
2D
3D
BIM
…

4. The duties of a product manufacturer
• Producing and selling products
– Trade
– Business processes
• Supplying precision technical data
– Energy performance analysis
– Life-cycle cost (LCC)
– Life-cycle assessment (LCA)
– BIM processes
Linked data?
40% of building cost

5. BIM Objects

6. Tons of questions
• does a BIM object add value to my customers?
• for which products in my product range do I
need to have BIM objects?
• how much detail will I need to specify and
which software formats do I need to support?
• how do I handle different professional and
process information requirements?
• will there be a return on my investment and
subsequent increase in sales?

7. product data
templates (PDTs)
7

8. “A product data template is simply a form that
contains standardised headings against which
manufacturers product information is placed.
There is a different template for each type of
product.”
Ian Chapman, NBS
https://toolkit.thenbs.com/articles/pdts
What is a PDT?
8

9. Declaration of
Performance (DoP)
Environment
Performance
Declaration (EPD),

10. Strategy and approach
• Specified and developed by specialists in the
industry with varying relevant backgrounds e.g.
professional associations, trade association,
interest groups, industry standard bodies, and
specifier and product manufacturer organizations
• Common shared view in specifying product types,
including properties, naming, units etc. and thus
guaranteeing a common set of properties and
attributes in accordance with harmonized,
national and industry standards and guidelines.

11. Template
Tool
Product Rockwool
Density 30 kg/m3
Thickness 100 mm
Width 600 mm
Length 1200 mm
Thermal
Resistance 1.85 M2 K/W
Fire Class A1
Product Data
PDF
Product Data
Template
IFC
COBie
Import
Export
Environmental
Product
Declaration
Production
DB

12. aim
• a user friendly tool to assist manufacturers in
supplying structured data about their
products
– No need to manage hundreds Excel data sheets
– No new PDT
• Simplify the publication process for publishing
product data towards prospective customers

13. How
• Use the appropriate web technologies,
• Use agreed PDTs,
• Use intuitive interfaces (for manufacturers:
Excel)

14. SemCat
14

15. SemCat Excel Plug-in
Catalogue
Manager
Template
Manager
Catalogue
Registration
Export
Template
Engine
PDT
PDT
Search Engines
Suppliers
Information
Providers
Export
Templates
Product Data
Templates +
SPie, NBS Import
Publish to
RDF & HTML+Microdata
Product Catalogue
Archive

17. Classification tables

18. Property tables

19. Unit tables

20. Manage product catalogue

21. Import/Export PDT

22. New Product / Edit Product

23. Export catalogue

24. Publication of data
1. as a product catalogue represented in RDF
and
2. as product web pages with embedded
semantic mark-up in Microdata/RDFa for
company and product data.
=> provide open standard multi-lingual semantic
product data by using industry established PDTs

25. SemCat Excel Plug-in
Catalogue
Manager
Template
Manager
Catalogue
Registration
Export
Template
Engine
PDT
PDT
Search Engines
Suppliers
Information
Providers
Export
Templates
Product Data
Templates +
SPie, NBS Import
Publish to
RDF & HTML+Microdata
Product Catalogue
Archive

26. Conclusion
26

27. Gains
1. Semantic search with indexes at a much higher detail and
property level
2. Facilitating innovative business ventures in linking various
construction data with manufactured product data,
3. suppliers and product distributers’ access to detailed product and
business data e.g. packaging and shipping,
4. supporting BIM object development with external detailed
product data through links to the actual product data by their
unique web URI or class of products by classification code,
5. extending the product data by linking to company specific and
market data (e.g. suppliers and identifying location, regions,
countries where the product is eligible for shipment etc.),
6. making the product data part of the global web of data.

28. Future work
• Synchronization of existing product catalogues with
new versions of PDTs.
• The development of a more consistent method to
structure and naming property sets in the properties
table is pending.
• align with SPie and NBS PDTs
• investigate the possibility of using the property
classification table in the OmniclassTM system as part
of the properties ontology.
• Formal definitions of enumerations for enumerated
properties need to be considered
• support for DoP and EDP publication.

29. Thank you
Pieter Pauwels, Ghent University
pipauwel.pauwels@ugent.be
Gudni Gudnason, Innovation Center Iceland,
gudni.g@nmi.is