在美國，對於建築和內部系統的控管，許多的研究學者發展了許多的計算方法和演算法，並且可以自動和不斷的分析整個內部系統狀態。而這些研究中，如何將需要的資訊正確地擷取出來，提供給演算法去運算，成為了一個重要問題。本研究提出利用Ontology (本體論)的研究中，利用推論的方法，將建築資訊模型所需要的資訊推論出來。
Ontology原本是哲學上的名詞，在近年來，其概念被借用到電腦領域上，以一個概念的集合來表現某個知識領域與各個概念之間的關係，並可藉此在邏輯上做推論，並且對該知識領域進行描述。而為了建立本體模型，許多組織開始發展Ontology Language。在本研究中，使用了其中的OWL(Web Ontology Language)，這是由W3C(World Wide Web Consortium)組織所開發，以W3C原本的RDF(Resource Description Framework)和XML(Extensible Markup Language)為基礎來發展，為Protégé軟體的基礎之一，在分享和建立模型上都很方便快速。Protégé是由Stanford University以Java語言所撰寫的開放原始碼軟體，是編輯本體模型的使用者介面。本研究主要以Protégé實作本體模型，加上OWLAPI所提供的API，撰寫程式對本體模型進行操作，並利用Pellet所提供的推論軟體進行推論。之後加上OWL的延伸語言SWRL(Semantic Web Rule Language)做額外的推論，最後結合BIM(Building Information Modeling)的模型，將BIM的模型藉由Protégé人工轉換成本體模型，利用OWL與SWRL將所需要的資料推論出來，給其他的程式做應用。

In United States, there are many researchers developing hundreds of computerized approaches and algorithms that can be used to automatically and continuously analyze the conditions of entire building systems. In these research projects, it is an importation problem regarding how to certainly retrieve needed information and how to provide relevant information for further processing. This research discussed development of a new reasoning mechanism that combines several ontology-related technologies such as OWL, Protégé and SWRL tools.

The term “Ontology” originates from philosophy. For the past few years, the concept in Ontology is applied in computer science and information science. It uses a set of concepts to represent knowledge within a domain. It can describe and reason about the domain knowledge. In order to build the ontology model, many organizations begin to develop the Ontology Language. In this study, we utilized the OWL(Web Ontology Language), which is proposed by W3C(World Wide Web Consortium) and is based on RDF(Resource Description Framework) and XML(Extensible Markup Language). It is one of the foundations for Protégé. Protégé is the user interface for editing the ontology model and was developed by Stanford University using JAVA. Protégé is a open source tool. In this study, we mainly used Protégé to construct the ontology model then edited the model through the OWLAPI, which part of its interfaces are supported by Pellet. Because Pellet cannot provide full functionality for reasoning some detailed knowledge, another tool, called “SWRL” (Semantic Web Rule Language), i.e., an extended rule language, was utilized to do more complicated business processes. Finally, we combined the BIM model to reason the required information, and provided the information for other programs to process.

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