  In the context of Building Information Modelling, ontologies have been
identified as interesting in achieving information interoperability. Regarding
the construction and facility management domains, several IFC (Industry
Foundation Classes) based ontologies have been developed, such as IfcOWL. In
the context of ontology modelling, the constraint of optimizing the size of IFC
STEP-based files can be leveraged. In this paper, we propose an adaptation of
the IFC model into OWL which leverages from all modelling constraints required
by the object-oriented structure of IFC schema. Therefore, we do not only
present a syntactic but also a semantic adaptation of the IFC model. Our model
takes into consideration the meaning of entities, relationships, properties and
attributes defined by the IFC standard. Our approach presents several
advantages compared to other initiatives such as the optimization of query
execution time. Every advantage is defended by means of practical examples and
benchmarks.
