Dear Colleagues,

In recent years, 3D models of cities and their buildings, including geometric and semantic contents, have been largely acknowledged as a powerful tool for many research fields and applications (building and infrastructure design, conservation and restoration support, urban design and planning, assets management, and so on). BIM (building information models) and HBIM (historical BIM/heritage BIM) are also of relevance, particularly, when historical urban areas and architectural assets are involved.

The great development (in number and functionalities) of BIM systems and tools leads to relevant questions about how to actually enhance their flexibility in order to make their exchange, maintenance, and reusability effective within both the urban and the building scale.

The use of open standards is, obviously, a good choice, but many issues surrounding open standards remain unresolved. Industry foundation classes (IFC) by buildingSMART are the affirmed open standard for managing BIMs. However, many other standards exist for the same objects, concerning buildings and their urban context (OGC CityGML, gbXML, the INSPIRE data model, and national standards are some examples). Their effective integration has been the topic of many studies, using different approaches (manual mapping approaches, ontologies, and others), but there has been no definitive solution.

Furthermore, the definition of rules and best practices about how to model BIMs and HBIMs properly, envisaging their reuse and exchange, is an open issue in the field. This is particularly true when dealing with HBIMs and, in general, as-built BIMs.

Moreover, other 3D models and spatial products are based on mapping standards and derive from survey and modeling methods of a different nature (image and range-based acquisitions, remote sensing, lidar, different modeling techniques, scan to BIM processes, the use of NURBS). Therefore, their interoperability with BIM has become an important issue.

It is necessary to solve the problems of interoperability and standardization in order to build efficient and useful BIMs and HBIMs that can effectively take advantage of the many available technologies for their management.

This Special Issue of Applied Sciences, titled “BIM and HBIM: Principles, Applications, and Standardization/Interoperability Issues” will outline how the proposed solutions for interoperability and the use of standards can bring advantages for BIM and HBIM applications (including design and construction projects, use of BIM in urban space planning, historical built heritage documentation, conservation projects, and asset management, together with projects that address the emerging demands of our era: lower energy consumption, smart networking, logistics, conservation strategies, enhanced resilience, and so on.

Prof. Dr. Antonia Spano'
Dr. Francesca Noardo
Dr. Margarita Kokla
Guest Editors

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