Spatial Enrichment by Applying Hierarchy to Built Infrastructure

This paper shows how hierarchical organisation of data from construction and built infrastructure can help to overcome limitations of nowadays systems that arise from distributed storing and different file formats. This hierarchy, once established, can then be used to ensure fast access to vast amounts of distributed data and enriches the information basis by spatial context, such that information spread over former distinct storage locations are connected to each other and therefore can be treated in a combined and unified fashion. Since in our approach an octree structure is used to hold the spatial assembly of the models, many properties such as intersection detection of objects or voxel representations can be evaluated efficiently, to still have access to the original geometry if necessary - each voxel of the octree stores an additional link to the respective CAD entity.