Helps Automate the Construction and Organization of Taxonomies and Ontologies for Interoperability Among Software Programs
The taxonomy editor software helps promote the efficient and seamless transfer of information between software by graphically enabling the ability to assign taxonomic-based relationships and conversions among a data set or native schema. It is an organization tool that harnesses various functions and proprietary algorithms to automate creating, modifying, and exporting a taxonomy and, ultimately, provides the efficient transfer of data to any design software. Bridge Information Modeling (BrIM) is an important trend in the highway transportation industry, in which a variety of technologies and software are used in all phases of the bridge lifecycle. However, most available software consists of stand-alone applications that do not efficiently exchange data with other software programs. This lack of interoperability hinders the efficient and seamless transfer of information needed for bridge construction.
Researchers at the University of Florida have created a taxonomy editor software tool to automate the building of a taxonomy that can be converted into a software schema such as the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) standard so that end users can design building projects with consistent semantics and logic no matter which software they use.
Application
A streamlined system for data input to create an organized taxonomy for bridge and other building applications
Advantages
- Automates the manual tasks associated with creating, modifying, and exporting a taxonomy
- Provides for easy conversion into various computer languages, allowing end-users to design buildings with any software and get the same output
- Developed for Bridge Information Modeling, but can be extended to any building application
Technology
Multiple functions and proprietary algorithms automate the manual tasks associated with creating, modifying, and exporting bridge taxonomy. Includes two input/output documents: data set, essentially a dictionary of components used to populate the taxonomy, and the taxonomy. The resulting taxonomy can be exported to HTML and .xlsx format which can then be imported into other ontology programs or schemas, such as IFC. Ontologies could be used by software developers as a common language. Any version of the software would yield the same output to the builder. THIS TECHNOLOGY IS NOT LIMITED TO ONLY BUILDINGS, as it can be extended to essentially any application requiring taxonomies.
Brochure
