Unveiling BIM Core: Enhancing Long-Term Usability of Digital Building Documentation with an Advanced Representation Information Repository

The long-term usability of digital building documentation is essential for the maintenance and optimization of infrastructure portfolios. It supports the preservation of building-specific knowledge and the cultural heritage hidden within. However, having to do this throughout the entire lifecycle of a building—or even indefinitely—remains a major challenge. This is especially true for organizations responsible for large collections of digital building documents and datasets, such as public administrations or archives. In this article, we first describe the challenges and requirements associated with preservation tasks and then introduce the concept of representation information within Building Information Modeling (BIM) and all types of related data and documents. This type of information is important to give meaning to the stored bit sequences for a particular community. We then design a repository for representation information and propose some 23 so-called BIM Core content elements. Finally, we focus on BIM and the construction sector and explain how the proposed repository can be used to implement the two concepts introduced in the ISO reference model Open Archival Information System (OAIS), namely the representation information and the context information, as well as the concept of significant properties, which has not yet been explicitly modeled in OAIS.