Building information modelling framework: A research and delivery foundation for industry stakeholders

Building Information Modelling (BIM) is an expansive knowledge domain within the Architecture, Engineering, Construction and Operations (AECO) industry. To allow a systematic investigation of BIM's divergent fields, its knowledge components must be defined and expanding boundaries delineated. This paper explores some of the publicly available international guidelines and introduces the BIM Framework, a research and delivery foundation for industry stakeholders. This is a 'scene-setting' paper identifying many conceptual parts (fields, stages, steps and lenses), providing examples of their application and listing some of the Framework's deliverables. This paper also identifies and deploys visual knowledge models and a specialised ontology to represent domain concepts and their relations. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.