21 1 INTRODUCTION In AEC industry, tools to facilitate the design process have until the last decade been very much focused on automating 2 dimensional drawing board techniques. The emerging technolo- gies in last 15 years focused on 3D modeling and facilitating collaborative design. In fact, most of the problems in the field have been related to insufficient interoperability and integration be- tween different systems used, in the industry and throughout the lifecycle of an AEC project. In last 10 years Building Information Modeling have become a key research item in the global agenda to address the problems related to the inefficient sharing of information and collabora- tion throughout the lifecycle of an AEC project and the building (i.e. from feasibility and con- ceptual design stages through to demolition and re-cycling). The academic community has spent considerable time and effort in last 10 years for exploring the opportunities that these intelligent Building Information Models (BIMs) would provide to the industry. In late 1990s, the use of “Product Modeling” approach in AEC industry is defined as “Building Information Modeling” and at that time, BIMs were prescribed as a remedy for the illness of “Data Interoperability” in the industry. However, with the new interpretation of “Building Information Modeling”, it is now apparent that this ‘magic remedy’ has evolved to cure much more ‘illnesses’ than it was originally prescribed for. Today the implementation of the Building Information Modeling paradigm is achieved by us- ing several applications supporting an intelligent digital building model defined by the agreed schema standards such as IFC and CIS/2. Well-recognized applications used in the AEC indus- try are today capable of importing and exporting digital building models in form of BIMs, and few of them are also capable of acquiring information from BIMs through the use of a shared resource (such as a model server database). Building Information Modeling is applied in many different areas, for example either BIMs are used as a resource to enable interoperability or An opportunity analysis on the future role of BIMs in urban data management U. Isikdag Beykent University, Turkey S. Zlatanova Delft University of Technology, GIS Technology Section, Delft, The Netherlands J. Underwood University of Salford, UK ABSTRACT: In order to facilitate some urban management tasks, information regarding build- ings needs to be represented in form of geospatial information. Some tasks in urban manage- ment such as indoor navigation, emergency response management, and processes in the con- struction life cycle e.g. site selection can be facilitated through the use of certain and sometimes high amount of, geometric and semantic information about a building. A Building Information Model (BIM) can be defined as a semantically rich shared 3D digital building model. Recent re- search has demonstrated that geometric and semantic information from BIMs can be transferred into the geospatial environment and CAD/GIS/BIM information can be integrated at web ser- vices level. This paper presents a comparative opportunity analysis on the future role of BIMs in Urban Data Management. The analysis presented was focused on exploring, the impact of pro- gression in Building Information Modeling research, to the opportunities provided by the use of BIMs in Urban Data Management context.