Aligning Heterogeneous Views: Stakeholder Terminology and Multi-Level Mappings in the AEC Industry

Abstract: Construction stakeholders refer to the same asset using discipline-specific terms and abstraction levels, producing representations with inconsistent naming conventions and modeling granularity. Alignment across views often fails even with standards such as IFC, unless semantic relations and transformations are explicit. We contribute a typology of cross-view mapping requirements as a preceding decision layer for alignment. It determines the mapping type, intended semantic relation, and required transformation between two views, guiding candidate generation and validation. The typology covers direct entity correspondence, attribute-to-entity transformation, and cluster-based mapping, illustrated with examples from planning, construction, and operations, showing why label matching alone is insufficient.