An introduction to South Korea's BIM knowledge base development project

This paper introduces an effort to develop a building information modeling (BIM) knowledge base system that includes various BIM-related statistics and best practices. This study is currently being conducted as part of a US$5,800,000 national research and development project in South Korea to build open BIM-based building design standards and information technology (IT) infrastructure to improve design and construction efficiencies. The project consists of three phases and is currently in the first phase. The main goals of our study within this project are to develop a standardized format for the collection of BIM project cases and BIM key performance indicators (KPIs) so that data can be sustainably collected and easily searched for via the Web. The indexes are to be used to rapidly and intuitively show the status of national-and international-level BIM projects. The first version of the standardized format for collecting BIM project cases has been developed by analyzing existing BIM projects. The format has been disseminated to several contractors, architects, and BIM consultants to ascertain the completeness and usefulness of the format. A web system, which we refer to as the "global BIM dashboard," is also being developed. It will allow national and eventually international BIM users, researchers, and BIM-related decision makers to rapidly and intuitively acquire BIM information, including BIM statistics, BIM KPIs, and the lessons learned from best practices. The first phase of the BIM knowledge base project will not include a reasoning algorithm. As the system and data grow, however, we plan to add more intelligence to the system so that users can more easily and rapidly access the data they would like to acquire.