Bohan Tian

By Bohan Tian and Haomin Jiang

Built environment provides infrastructure and space that supports users’ activities through facility services. Space provides the context in which services are constructed. Facility services management is facing challenges in information management that requires vast and heterogeneous information from design to operations of a building across various service systems. Building information modelling (BIM), an object‐oriented modelling technology seeks to integrate information throughout the entire lifecycle of a building project. However, BIM is limited to meeting the needs of information arising from operation and management of facility services, and the requirements for BIM development are yet unclear. Though BIM building semantics can be enriched, but mainly focusing on building fabrics for design and build. BIM does not support the consideration of building operation activities and the context of building in‐use. From a semiotic perspective, the lack of address in pragmatic and social aspects of a building project limits BIM as a through‐life solution. This research deployed semiotics, a theory of signs, to analyse and develop BIM from an information system’s point of view. Organizational semiotics is a sub‐branch of semiotics, which offers a set of methods that can enhance BIM to link building fabrics to facility service activities.

Part of the book: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Semiotics