The article is Open Access. It was originally published on July 2019 on Research Gate. Link to article.
Since the early 2000s, different frameworks were set up to enable web-based collaboration in building projects. Unfortunately, none of these initiatives was granted a long life. Recently, however, the use of web technologies in the building industry has been gaining momentum again, considered some promising technologies for reaching a more interoperable BIM practice. Specifically, this relates to (1) Linked Data and Semantic Web technologies, and (2) cloud-based applications. In order to combine these into a network of interlinked applications and datastores, an agreed-upon mechanism for automatic communication and data retrieval needs to be used. Apart from the W3C standard SPARQL, often considered too high a threshold for developers to implement, there are some recent GraphQL-based solutions that simplify the querying process and its implementation into web services. In this paper, we review two recent open source technologies based on GraphQL, that enable to query Linked Data on the web: GraphQL-LD and HyperGraphQL.
Authors: Jeroen Werbrouck (*a,b), Madhumitha Senthilvel (*a), Jakob Beetz (*a), Pierre Bourreau (*c), Léon van Berlo (*d)
*a RWTH Aachen University, Germany
*b Ghent University, Belgium
*c Institut pour la Transition Energétique Nobatek/Inef4, France
*d Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research TNO, the Netherlands
