Scoped Review and Evaluation of Ontologies in Operation and Maintenance of Bridge Facilities

Operation and maintenance of civil infrastructure facilities such as bridges is the most extended period of the entire lifetime of the structures. This phase provides many opportunities that benefit society. However, such a wide span of operation also exposes bridges to various threats and risks. Therefore, knowledge domains such as Bridge Management System and life-cycle management are crucial ingredients for maintaining the level of performance of bridges and their components. Bridge Management System (BMS), since its emergence in 1975, has been constantly evolving to meet the needs of the industry with advancements in technology through new paradigms. To accelerate the process of creating and managing the data and information about bridge structures, the terms Bridge Information Modeling (BRiM) and Civil Information Modeling have appeared more frequently. Inspired by Building Information Modeling, the incentive is to manage the information better, from the concept until the end-of-life. The amount of created data is extensive and versatile. To address the issue of potential unstructured and heterogeneous information, academic and industrial researchers have been developing classifications, categories, and taxonomies. Given the advancements and growth of Semantic Web technologies, and qualities such as interoperability, machine-readable format, and extensibility, ontology development has become prominent. Current experience and success in creating and adapting ontologies into BIM workflow set examples for other branches in the built environment like civil engineering. Ontologies describing various areas of the bridge domain have been developed. However, proposals of how such information models could be aligned and integrated are seldom seen. This paper presents scoped evaluation of ontologies from bridge operation and maintenance domain. It gives an overview of how well different subjects are compliment entire topic, and it provides recommendations on modeling and evaluating ontologies related to a particular use case. It proposes a methodology that can be used for further development, alignment, and finding ontology gaps in the bridge domain.