BIMRL stands for Building Information Modeling (BIM) Rule Language. ETL stands for Extract, Transform and Load

BIMRL-ETL is a module developed as part of the author's Ph.D. thesis in Georgia Institute Technology that deals with BIM-based automated rule checking system. This module transforms IFC building models into an RDBMS simplified schema. The aim is to provide an efficient query-ability into BIM data that is traditionally difficult and slow.

The main features of BIMRL simplifies schema are:

• It is based on a proven RDBMS technology, which allows it to free users from the burden of reinventing the wheel on something that has worked so well.
• The RDBMS schema uses only 20 tables to capture IFC data relatively losless (within the scope of IFC CV2.0 MVD). It follows the Data Warehouse concept with simple star-schema that center around one single table for all the building objects
• It revolves around main concepts of: building objects, their properties, their relationships mainly with each other but also with other information such as Type, Classification and Material, geometry and spatial
• It also integrates a concept of a circulation graph connecting spaces though the walkable openings or doors horizontally and through stairs, ramps, or elevators vertically

It uses Xbim; the eXtensible Building Information Modelling (BIM) Toolkit to parse the IFC file before transforming it into the RDBMS simplified schema. This module is provided as a plugin to XbimWindowsUI.

It currently works only with Oracle RDBMS because it uses the Spatial Data Object (Oracle Spatial) to store the geometry. Beyond that BIMRL handles everything else such as generation of the spatial indexes, bounding boxes and the planar boundary representations.

You will need to have a few things:

1. Download and setup an Oracle database. It has to be at minimum the Standard Edition. Oracle 12c is recommended. Oracle allows free download and use for development purpose but not for commercial use without paying the license. You can download it from Oracle Technology Network

2. Once you have successfully setup and created a database instance, you need to run a setup script inside the script folder. It is best to run it from inside the folder as it calls other scripts located in the same folder

3. At least one user has to be created. It is recommended to use the following settings since there are some default settings used in BIMRL with these values. You may change these values by modifying the script and changing configurations in BIMRL UIs. * Userid: bimrl * password: bimrl * DB service name: pdborcl

4. Oracle Client installation and Net setup To connect to the Oracle server that has been setup as above, an Oracle Client (runtime) installation will be required for each machine that needs to connect to the database server. IMPORTANT NOTE: The required version of the Oracle Client (Runtime) installation that works with BIMRL-DBETL is 12.1.0. If the server runs Oracle database version other than 12.1.0, the client installation is also needed for the server machine to run BIMRL-ETL. Setup the Oracle Net connection similar to the server Net connection, except that the hostname must be the actual host name recognized by the client (on the server it is usually set to localhost).

5. You also need Visual Studio 2015 to compile BIMRL as well as Xbim. Visual Studio Community Edition from Microsoft is sufficient. It can be downloaded for free from Microsoft Visual Studio Website

6. Download Xbim modules needed for BIMRL. They can be downloaded directly from Xbim Github, or from a forked project for Invicara BIM Assure. The later version contains small modification to improve XbimWindowsUI. They are also available through nuget packages that can be used directly within the Visual Studio project. There 3 modules needed:

• Xbim Essentials
• Xbim Geometry
• Xbim WindowsUI or Xplorer

5. Once you are able to compile BIMRL, the project executables need to be copied to XbimXplorer\Plugins folder keeping the project names the same as a plugin folder:

• BIMRL_ETL.XplorerPlugin
• BIMRL_ETLConfig.XplorerPlugin
• BIMRL_Main.XplorerPlugin

BIMRL-ETL source code is made available under LGPLv3 and later. It allows the the library to be linked to any application even the commercial application without making the application to carry the same license. Only moficiation to the BIMRL-ETL codes will have to be licensed as well as LGPLv3 and later.

The three plugins if setup correctly will appear in the menu:

1. BIMRL_ETL.XplorerPlugin This module is the entry point to perform ETL from the IFC model loaded by Xbim into the Oracle DB. When invoking this menu, an option is given to perform full ETL process in one step, i.e. all the ETL process will be done at the end of the process with the pre-defined or automatically calculated parameters. In some cases when the detailed information may not be required or dfault setting needs to be overidden, untick the option and perform the individual ETL enhancements manually later on using the ETL main window UI.

2. BIMRL_ETLConfig.XplorerPlugin This module allows a few configuration settings for the session.

3. BIMRL_Main.XplorerPlugin This module is the main module for all models that are uploaded into BIMRL database

In this UI, there are various operations that can be done. The main one is to perform manual steps for the enhanced ETL:

1. Generate (or re-generate) spatial indexes. The level of Octree subdivision can be controlled by "Octree Level". The automatically calculated value can be obtained using "Compute" button.
2. Generate (or re-generate) boundary faces. This boundary faces are the optimized boundary faces supporting convex and concave polygon with holes. This process invloves "stiching" operations to optimize the set of triangles data and it may be sensitive to the geometric tolerance. To modify the built-in tolerance (0.0001, which is 0.1mm) specify the value in the "Tol" textbox.
3. Generate OBB and the projected OBB

Other functionalities include: delete a model from the dabase, generate X3D file from the model (full or partial). For partial model specify the list of elementid in the "Additional Filter/Condition" textbox, e.g. elementid='2hYXglInnGt00000000X5E', or elementid in ('2hYXglInnGt00000000X5E','2hYXglInnGt00000000X5X'). Make sure to select "Draw Element Geom" in the X3D option that instructs it to draw geometry of the model data.

The author wishes that by making this project open source, more people will benefit from it. Also the research community is encouraged to develop this further for the benefits of the community.