Bibliometric analysis of building information modeling, geographic information systems and web environment integration

Abstract

The integration of Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) within the Web environment is a promising approach that greatly enhances the capabilities of the aforementioned environments through the wide range of technology solutions used on the Web. This paper aims to reveal the trends of research in BIM, GIS, and Web integration and discuss the challenges and potential opportunities of such integration in terms of the most common uses in construction. The bibliometric analysis used as the method, compared to conventional literature reviews, reduces the likelihood of subjective judgments. The methodology used is based on a set of five research questions. To answer these, bibliographic coupling is used to analyze the publications datasets, specifically, co-citation networks, co-authorship networks, and the co-occurrence map of keywords. This review contributes to the field in raising awareness of the knowledge composition of BIM, GIS, and Web integration in the last decade, dominant research topics, the most recent trends, and the most pressing issues and use cases analyzed in the current studies related to BIM, GIS, and Web integration, thus identifying gaps and defining future research areas on the topic. The research shows that the number of developments focusing on BIM, GIS and Web integration has been continuously growing with a sudden increase after 2016. The study also revealed that the research work in this area consists of disjointed and fragmented research studies and has been conducted mainly in isolated clusters. Gaps and critical areas for future research include BIM, GIS, and Web interoperability solutions, standardization, BIM model processing and performance optimization, data exchange and storage.