What is Building Feature Service (BFS)

In the construction industry, BIM is enabling the information sharing and integration practise culture to emerge. Consideration of the geo-location is essential at the design and planning stage for building construction. It is important to integrate BIM with surrounding geo-spatial information which will not only benefit the construction industry in getting site information, but also help urban management in getting building details in the city. This chapter reports the emerging efforts on BIM integration with geospatial information within the urban built environment. The authors have been working on the design and development of the integration framework of BIM and geospatial information. In this framework, a BIM web service, Building Feature Service (BFS), is defined to retrieve building objects and elements information based on OGC’s Web Service. This framework can extend the scope of BIM to the urban built environment to support life cycle information services for both city management and the construction industry.