An ontology change management approach for facility management

Facility management (FM) or technical property management is an approach to operate, maintain, improve and adapt buildings and infrastructures of organizations. A FM project requires the cooperation of many actors from different domains so it has to be automated in a constrained collaborative environment. This paper proposes a new approach for ontology change management applied on facility management of such projects. The industrial challenge is, firstly, to ensure consistency of a FM project knowledge from the construction phase to the technical property management phase (after delivery). Secondly, it has to provide to each actor of the project a personal up-to-date “view” of the building knowledge related to its business profile and allow its evolution. The scientific approach, called OntoVersionGraph, is a change management methodology for managing ontology life cycle including ontology evolution and versioning features, in conjunction with contextual view modeling. Its contribution is the impact management of changes between the ontology and its different views.