Building permitting is essential for ensuring the safety, sustainability, and societal alignment of construction projects. Despite interest from both practitioners and researchers, the process remains largely manual and fragmented. Ontologies offer a promising solution by managing complexity and enabling automation through semantic information, though current ontologies in the building permit domain are limited to specific aspects like building code checking. On the process level, the OntoBPR framework integrates multiple domain-specific ontologies for a seamless digital permitting process and provides a workflow to automate the lifecycle of the permit review. Therefore, it suggests integrating the submitted building application using standardized information containers. The paper explores how digital applications can be submitted, reviewed, verified for completeness, and forwarded to authorities, and how permit review results can be gathered to support decision-making and automate notification issuance, and it provides a demonstration in a case study. In conclusion, OntoBPR formalizes a multi-layered ontology that advances and aligns the partitioned building permit process and provides an adaptable framework to harmonize diverse legal, informatics, and procedural aspects.

Building construction constitutes a specialized and project-specific procedure, encompassing numerous risks. In particular, risks related to execution and the associated costs of defects are a constant challenge for the architectural engineering and construction (AEC) industry. To achieve a balance between the optimum level of quality and the associated costs, knowledge of the composition of quality-related costs is required. In this paper, the objective is to automatically determine expected appraisal costs (ACs) and nonconformity costs (NCCs) from building information modeling (BIM) objects by using semantic web technologies. The ontology for construction quality assurance (OCQA), which is used for the automated planning of quality inspections serves as the initial ontology in this paper. Based on model data, historical quality data, and potential NCCs, the expected quality defects are determined and evaluated using shapes constraint language (SHACL) rules, with the ACs for the corresponding preventive inspections calculated simultaneously. The functionality of the ontology and its rules is demonstrated by defect type unevenness of screed.

Building permit processes lie on the divide between architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) and public administration. To ensure consistent and effective digitization in building permitting, it is necessary to consider and merge both areas. Hence, for advanced building permit processes, foundations must be developed, which begins with understanding and formalizing building permit authorities’ organizational structures and processes. Therefore, this study developed an ontology that covers a semantic representation of a building permit authority along with a subprocess of the building permit process called the assignment process. The assignment process describes how and on what basis building applications are assigned to appropriate building officials. Proposing a semantic representation of the assignment process, tacit knowledge from previously conducted data sets was analyzed and implemented in the ontology. As a case study, a sample building permit authority was described and implemented in the ontology. On the one hand, the developed ontology serves as a basis for decision support for building permit processes, while on the other hand, it enables a fully automated assignment process in a building permit authority. The approach not only makes the assignment process more objective and transparent for all parties involved in the building permit process but also allows time and personnel capacities to be used in its other subprocesses.