FZK-Haus — a building as a 3D knowledge graph

▸ Open the 3D building → — a three.js explorer over the fzk-haus knowledge graph: pick any wall, door, window, slab or room and see where it sits — its floor, the rooms it encloses, the rooms next to it, and everything within reach in 3D — with real SPARQL and geo3 (GeoSPARQL → 3D) running in the browser against the .rete.

The FZK-Haus 3D explorer: a detached two-storey house rendered in 3D at the centre with walls, a pitched roof, windows and a spiral stair, a left sidebar of element-type checkboxes (Walls, Slabs, Windows, Doors, Stairs, Railings, Beams, Members, Rooms) with counts and a storey filter (Erdgeschoss, Dachgeschoss), and a legend for selected / adjacent room / enclosing element / query result.
The explorer renders every IFC element of the house in 3D and colour-codes a picked element's relations — the rooms it encloses, the rooms adjacent to it, and the results of a spatial query.

From CAD to graph

The model is AC20-FZK-Haus, an openly-licensed IFC4 sample building (a small detached house) published by KIT for the IBPSA Project 1. IFC (ISO 16739) is the open BIM exchange format, and it is already semantic: it carries typed elements (walls, doors, windows, slabs, stairs…), spatial structure (site → building → storey → space), and relationships (which elements bound a room, which openings a wall hosts). We parse it with IfcOpenShell and lift it into three layers of RDF:

  • BOT — the W3C Building Topology Ontology — for the spatial breakdown: bot:Site, bot:Building, bot:Storey, bot:Space, bot:Element, tied together by bot:hasStorey, bot:hasSpace, bot:containsElement, bot:adjacentElement.
  • cad: for the IFC specifics: cad:ifcClass, cad:material, cad:boundsSpace (space boundaries), cad:adjacentSpace, cad:fillsWall.
  • geo3 for geometry: every element carries a 3D point and an axis-aligned bounding box, in metres, in the building's own coordinate frame.

What you see

The centre pane is a real 3D scene: left-drag to orbit, right-drag (or Shift-drag) to pan, scroll to zoom, click any element to select it. The left sidebar toggles element types — Walls, Slabs, Windows, Doors, Stairs, Railings, Beams, structural Members, and the room volumes — each with a live count, plus a Storeys filter to isolate a floor. Find an element searches every element and room by name. The right panel describes whatever is selected: its IFC type, floor, material, and its topological neighbours — for a room, the rooms adjacent to it and the elements that enclose it; for a wall, the rooms it encloses. Clicking a related item jumps to it.

Every relation is a materialised edge

The colours in the legend aren't drawn by hand. Room adjacency comes from the IFC space boundaries (cad:boundsSpace → cad:adjacentSpace); "what's near the staircase" is computed by geo3, rete's extension of GeoSPARQL into three dimensions (geof3:distance3D, and the same geo3:box / geo3:asWKT3D geometry the anatomy explorer uses) — the identical engine, now finding relations between the physical parts of a building instead of an organism.

Select by query

The Select by query panel runs that idea live. Ready examples — the rooms on each floor, the building's element inventory, the rooms adjacent to the living room, the walls that enclose the kitchen, the ten elements nearest the staircase via geof3:distance3D, and how many walls enclose each room — are real SPARQL against fzk-haus.rete, executed in-browser (the query engine and graph load lazily, once) and highlighted straight onto the model. There's also a box to write your own SPARQL; matches populate the results table below the scene and clicking a row selects that element in 3D. Room labels are language-tagged, so match them as "Wohnen"@en.

The same data, queryable

The explorer is one lens on a regular playground dataset. Open fzk-haus to run SPARQL directly — the same spatial structure, topology, and 3D geometry, with no rendering in the way.