Drupal as a Building Management System

As we all know, Drupal is great for building web platforms, but now we can also manage real buildings with it. Not just facilitation management with modules as rooms or availability calendars, but the actual building itself. This is done with a Building Information Model (BIM) in which all the geometry and relevant metadata for constructing the building is stored. We’ve been able to expose this information to Drupal and allowing to fully utilise its CMS capabilities.

This research initiated from the DDSS2014 (http://www.ddss.nl/) conference in August 2014 at the Technical University Eindhoven. It contributes to the development of IFC based web applications in practice and demonstrates a way of linking machine to human readable data, thus making the data accessible to people without the knowledge of Computer Aided Design (CAD) software.

The next step is the mapping the building’s IFC data to the semantic web, exposing the buildings by means of RDFx and SPARQL to search engines and other web systems.

We elaborate on several uses for this platform:

• Applications for maintenance planning,
• Reuse of building materials,
• Management of buildings,
• Exploitation of large complexes of buildings.

This way the world of the CMS meets 3D visualisation and real time monitoring. Drupal will facilitate documents, discussions, calculations, calendars, workflows and other non geometry specific data. Other services are exposed in the same user interface.

We envision this application as the central point where all data about the building is being stored, used, structured and updated, through the entire lifecycle from first concept to demolition and recycle.

This presentation will show the human perspective of this ongoing research at its most progressed state. The demo will focus on the Drupal parts of the code and how Backbone manages the front- and backend of the platform.