Visual language approach to representing KBimCode-based Korea building code sentences for automated rule checking

The Building Information Modeling (BIM) and its applications enable an automatic building permit process based on 3D building models and their associated information. A crucial part of the building permit process is the interpretation and transformation of natural language-based building regulation into a computer-readable and executable format. As other countries and their projects have developed a certain type of rule-translation methods, KBimCode, part of the KBim application series, has been developed and supported by the Korean government to ignite an automatic, BIM-based building permit system on top of the current e-submission system, which is called Seumter. The rule translation process usually employs a computer hard-coded approach because of its ease of implementation, and there have been advances in making the computer understand the natural language-based building regulations using parametric input tables and script languages. This project includes a step for developing a logic rule-based approach for translating natural language into computer-executable code. However, the main contribution of this study is the introduction of an approach to represent such text-based regulations using visual language for novice programmers, architects, and rule reviewers. This paper describes a KBimCode visual language that is easy-to-write and intuitive because it uses visual symbols instead of textual coding.