Dear OSArch community,
I could really use your input on some ideas, that some of you will hopefully find intriguing... Planning to write my master thesis in archaeology on open source 3d documentation methods for excavations, inspired by other Blender-uses, I came across BIM, and BlenderBIM.
For the past few days, I have now been learning about BIM and ifc (basically just grasped the basic concepts), to see whats possible. As archaeological excavations are still largely documented in 2D, and the 3D models we create of our trenches and layers (photogrammetry or laserscans) are usually treated as extras, rarely connected to data, I see huge potential for improvement in archaeological practice.
IFC got me really interested because of the way it structures data.
Regarding spatial structures and aggregates: Just like in AEC a project contains a site contains a building contains a storey contains a wall, so does in archaeology a project contain a site contains an excavation area contains a trench contains layer contains objects.
Regarding materials: Just like in AEC a wall can consist of multiple elements, an archaeological layer can consist of multiple elements. And just like another type of IFC material classification (constituent or smth?) can describe cement as consisting of water, sand etc., we describe layers or encountered architectural remains as consisting out of this or that material in this or that amount.
Other super useful and important features for then 3D modeled excavation sites would be geolocation, the sectioning at any desired spot and the 2D Plan generation offered by BlenderBIM.
So I hope you see how I consider the general way IFC structure data as very similar to how we structure data in archaeology, although we often do so on paper and in spreadsheets...
Now, regarding attributes and property sets, this system would also match well with archaeology, as the attributes of many IFC classes (that cannot be changed) are desirable as they are for archaeological features, and custom property sets would allow us to set all those archaeology-specific properties, like dating of a layer, subjective description, samples taken, photographs linked etc. (I think?)
I am aware that custom properties of course partly removes the "structured-ness" and standardisation from the data, which is the point of IFC, but in archaeology some people may actually prefer this customizability of the properties over standardized input due to the huge variation in archaeological features around the world.
So instead of our current relational databases based just on words and numbers, with 3D models linked like photos, used just as extra-data one can look at if desired, I imagine a 3D model of a trench with all its layers and objects that IS the database, just like BIM, but without the "Building". So this would be very different from the uses of BIM in the heritage sector so far (like HBIM and ArchaeoBIM), that all still focus only on architecture.
(And there are good workflows recently created that end up with 3D models of the individual layers with a reasonable poly-count, so that aspect should hopefully not be a problem)
As you can probably gather, my learning-journey on this topic just began, and my knowledge is quite superficial thus far. But before I get into this too deeply, I wanted to ask for your perspectives on this idea.
Do you think this would work? Or should we archaeologists stick to our QGIS polygons with their attribute tables and such?
If you think it makes sense from the basic structure, do you think there are IFC classes/concepts that could serve for this purpose? Or by misappropriating classes for this purpose could I at most make a proof-of-concept for structuring data in this way, but we would need very different classes for archaeology?
Would hugely appreciate your insights on this. Soon I am set to present my ideas on this to my fellow archaeologists, who do not know about BIM and certainly not about IFC, so your knowledge is highly relevant. My master thesis (as currently planned) will not solely revolve around this, but possibilities of open source 3d documentation of excavations in general, so feel free to very much torpedo my hopes for this :D
Thank you :)