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Lennard Buttgereit, Merna Emara

• Current practices in Building Information Modelling rely heavily on files. They provide great flexibility in way of exchange, they can be used to document the information delivery, and are the source for modelling software. On the other hand, files are not optimized for long-term data management as data manipulation is only possible by means of software. This includes the extraction, updating, and deletion of present data as well as the insertion of new data during a building-life-cycle. For this reason, database-centered IFC-based BIM-models should be reviewed as an alternative. They maintain each information as a single data entry which enables precise and flexible data management. This paper discusses previous work done on this field including different database models and proposes a revised object-relational approach which is successfully validated on an exemplary model. In conformity with IFC metamodel definitions, instances are stored in entity-based objecttables and can subsequently be manipulated with the ISO-standardized language SQL. Possible applications include long-term management and links to large sensor data sets.