Ontologies play a pivotal role in knowledge representation, particularly beneficial for the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) sector due to its inherent data diversity and intricacy. Despite the growing interest in ontology and data integration research, especially with the advent of knowledge graphs and digital twins, a noticeable lack of consolidated academic synthesis still needs to be addressed. This review paper aims to bridge that gap, meticulously analysing 142 journal articles from 2000 to 2021 on the application of ontologies in the AEC sector. The research is segmented through systematic evaluation into ten application domains within the construction realm- process, cost, operation/maintenance, health/safety, sustainability, monitoring/control, intelligent cities, heritage building information modelling (HBIM), compliance, and miscellaneous. This categorisation aids in pinpointing ontologies suitable for various research objectives. Furthermore, the paper highlights prevalent limitations within current ontology studies in the AEC sector. It offers strategic recommendations, presenting a well-defined path for future research to address these gaps.

In the realm of construction production control, effective communication across operational levels and the rapid influx of diverse data are essential. Yet, integrating this data faces challenges due to disparate systems and a lack of common terminology, resulting in data silos and hindered interoperability. An ontology-based solution emerges as promising for enhancing interoperability. This research paper introduces the development, implementation, and assessment of the cSite ontology, encompasses several crucial facets necessary for efficient production control such as location, activities, and documents. To evaluate its practicality, a real-case study was conducted, wherein the ontology was employed to answer competency questions through SPARQL queries. Furthermore, interactive dashboards, situated within the construction control rooms, were developed to present the information visually. This paper underscores the transformative potential of integrated and visualised production information in construction projects. Additionally, it illuminates how the cSite ontology can facilitate the development and implementation of construction digital twins.

A pronounced gap often exists between expected and actual safety performance in the construction industry. The multifaceted causes of this performance gap are resulting from the misalignment between design assumptions and actual construction processes that take place on-site. In general, critical factors are rooted in the lack of interoperability around the building and work-environment information due to its heterogeneous nature. To overcome the interoperability challenge in safety management, this paper represents the development of an ontological model consisting of terms and relationships between these terms, creating a conceptual information model for construction safety management and linking that ontology to IfcOWL. The developed ontology, named Safety and Health Exchange (SHE), comprises eight concepts and their relationships required to identify and manage safety risks in the design and planning stages. The main concepts of the developed ontology are identified based on reviewing accident cases from 165 Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations (RIDDOR) and 31 Press Releases from the database of the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) in the United Kingdom. Consequently, a semantic mapping between the developed ontology and IfcOWL (the most popular ontology and schema for interoperability in the AEC sector) is proposed. Then several SPARQL queries were developed and implemented to evaluate the semantic consistency of the developed ontology and the cross-mapping. The proposed ontology and cross-mapping gained recognition for its innovation in utilising OpenBIM and won the BuildingSMART professional research award 2020. This work could facilitate developing a knowledge-based system in the BIM environment to assist designers in addressing health and safety issues during the design and planning phases in the construction sector.

With ongoing development of construction digital twins, several works presented in the last couple of years are taking the same approach, solutions, steps, and findings of Building Information Modelling (BIM). This piece of work is questioning if that is enough or we could be misinformed by the BIM’s survivorship bias of what information should be collected, integrated, and visualized in construction sites. This research is a part of ongoing research project exploring the application of construction digital twins through production control rooms. In this research, an ontology related to construction programme and production control (CPPC) is proposed. The proposed ontology is shared representation that specify the terms and relations of production control in construction. The development is based on a real case study in the U.K and it is mapped to existing ontologies such as BOT, DiCon and Prov. The developed ontology was evaluated by automatic consistency checking, evaluating the SPARQL queries against the competency questions and representing the outputs to stakeholders of the selected construction project. The results show that the ontology represents the domain knowledge and demonstrates its’ efficiency to enhance the production control of construction sites.

Extending current work on visualization in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) sector, this paper describes an industry-led collaborative research and innovation project to develop and use a control room on the construction site. The work is inspired by NASA mission operations, with its large-scale visual display. It addresses the challenges of visualizing realtime construction data. Working with a main contractor, technology companies, and other researchers, we first give an overview of the progress of the overall project to date and discuss our contributions on requirements, realtime simulation of construction data, and visualization. We conclude by discussing the contribution to work on visualizing construction.