National foreword

This Published Document is the UK implementation of CEN ISO/TS 19166:2025. It is identical to ISO/TS 19166:2025. It supersedes PD ISO/TS 19166:2021, which is withdrawn.

The UK participation in its preparation was entrusted to Technical Committee IST/36, Geographic information.

A list of organizations represented on this committee can be obtained on request to its committee manager.

Contractual and legal considerations

This publication has been prepared in good faith, however no representation, warranty, assurance or undertaking (express or implied) is or will be made, and no responsibility or liability is or will be accepted by BSI in relation to the adequacy, accuracy, completeness or reasonableness of this publication. All and any such responsibility and liability is expressly disclaimed to the full extent permitted by the law.

This publication is provided as is, and is to be used at the recipient’s own risk.

The recipient is advised to consider seeking professional guidance with respect to its use of this publication.

This publication is not intended to constitute a contract. Users are responsible for its correct application.

This publication is not to be regarded as a British Standard.

Compliance with a Published Document cannot confer immunity from legal obligations.

This Published Document was published under the authority of the Standards Policy and Strategy Committee on 31 December 2025.

This Technical Specification (CEN/TS) was approved by CEN on 25 November 2025 for provisional application.

The period of validity of this CEN/TS is limited initially to three years. After two years the members of CEN will be requested to submit their comments, particularly on the question whether the CEN/TS can be converted into a European Standard.

CEN members are required to announce the existence of this CEN/TS in the same way as for an EN and to make the CEN/TS available promptly at national level in an appropriate form. It is permissible to keep conflicting national standards in force (in parallel to the CEN/TS) until the final decision about the possible conversion of the CEN/TS into an EN is reached.

CEN members are the national standards bodies of Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Republic of North Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Türkiye and United Kingdom.

European foreword

This document (CEN ISO/TS 19166:2025) has been prepared by Technical Committee ISO/TC 211 "Geographic information/Geomatics" in collaboration with Technical Committee CEN/TC 287 “Geographic Information” the secretariat of which is held by BSI.

Attention is drawn to the possibility that some of the elements of this document may be the subject of patent rights. CEN shall not be held responsible for identifying any or all such patent rights.

Any feedback and questions on this document should be directed to the users’ national standards body/national committee. A complete listing of these bodies can be found on the CEN website.

According to the CEN-CENELEC Internal Regulations, the national standards organizations of the following countries are bound to announce this Technical Specification: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Republic of North Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Türkiye and the United Kingdom.

Endorsement notice

The text of ISO/TS 19166:2025 has been approved by CEN as CEN ISO/TS 19166:2025 without any modification.

Foreword

ISO (the International Organization for Standardization) is a worldwide federation of national standards bodies (ISO member bodies). The work of preparing International Standards is normally carried out through ISO technical committees. Each member body interested in a subject for which a technical committee has been established has the right to be represented on that committee. International organizations, governmental and non-governmental, in liaison with ISO, also take part in the work. ISO collaborates closely with the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) on all matters of electrotechnical standardization.

The procedures used to develop this document and those intended for its further maintenance are described in the ISO/IEC Directives, Part 1. In particular, the different approval criteria needed for the different types of ISO document should be noted. This document was drafted in accordance with the editorial rules of the ISO/IEC Directives, Part 2 (see www.iso.org/directives).

ISO draws attention to the possibility that the implementation of this document may involve the use of (a) patent(s). ISO takes no position concerning the evidence, validity or applicability of any claimed patent rights in respect thereof. As of the date of publication of this document, ISO had not received notice of (a) patent(s) which may be required to implement this document. However, implementers are cautioned that this may not represent the latest information, which may be obtained from the patent database available at www.iso.org/patents. ISO shall not be held responsible for identifying any or all such patent rights.

Any trade name used in this document is information given for the convenience of users and does not constitute an endorsement.

For an explanation of the voluntary nature of standards, the meaning of ISO specific terms and expressions related to conformity assessment, as well as information about ISO’s adherence to the World Trade Organization (WTO) principles in the Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT), see www.iso.org/iso/foreword.html.

This document was prepared by Technical Committee ISO/TC 211, Geographic information/Geomatics, in collaboration with the European Committee for Standardization (CEN) Technical Committee CEN/TC 287, Geographic Information, in accordance with the Agreement on technical cooperation between ISO and CEN (Vienna Agreement).

This second edition cancels and replaces the first edition (ISO/TS 19166:2021), which has been technically revised.

The main changes are as follows:

definitions 3.3, 3.9, 3.10 and 3.13 have been revised;
Figure 4, Figure 5, Figure 7, Figure 9 and Figure 10 have been revised.

Any feedback or questions on this document should be directed to the user’s national standards body. A complete listing of these bodies can be found at www.iso.org/members.html.

Introduction

Building information modelling (BIM) contains rich information related to building elements such as doors, walls, windows, MEP (mechanical, electrical and plumbing) and others. In addition, BIM models can include information about other features than buildings which are relevant to geographic information systems (GIS). From the viewpoint of GIS, there are many benefits related to using BIM information in GIS applications. Some examples are:

indoor service implementation such as emergency management (routing, evacuation path finding under fire situation);
outdoor–indoor linkage service, such as seamless navigation;
effective facility/energy/environment management considering objects related BIM based on GIS.

Although there have been some attempts to harvest the rich information contained in BIM models and use it in GIS, there is no established way to map the information elements between the two modelling worlds. A proper mapping method is clearly required. Before the implementation of the information mapping, however, mapping mechanisms for linking appropriate information elements from BIM to GIS should be clearly defined. In addition, for the mapping mechanisms to work together, a conceptual framework for the mapping process based on open standards between BIM and GIS should be established.

This document provides the conceptual framework for BIM to GIS information mapping and required mapping mechanisms.

A brief explanation of each mapping mechanism is as follows:

BIM to GIS perspective definition (B2G PD): Supports perspective information representation depending on the specific requirement such as the urban facility management (UFM). “Perspective” depends on the use case. For example, to manage the urban facilities, the required data should be collected from the various data sources, including the BIM model, and transformed to represent in the user-specific perspective. PD defines a data view to extract the data required and transform the information from the various data sources.
BIM to GIS element mapping (B2G EM): Supports the element mapping from BIM model to GIS model. As the BIM and GIS model schemas are different, B2G EM requires a mapping rule specifying how to transform from a BIM model to a GIS model element.
BIM to GIS level of detail (LOD) mapping (B2G LM): Supports the LOD mapping from BIM model to GIS model. LOD in GIS is a deliberate choice of data included/excluded from a model to satisfy certain use cases including visualization. The relevant geometric and other information for the LODs required in the target GIS model should be extracted/or queried from the BIM model. This can be defined by the LOD mapping ruleset.

This document is applicable to information query services such as UFM operation. BIM object visualization in GIS and other application services that require query processing depending on the relationship between BIM and GIS objects, either in the real or virtual world, will be able to use the mechanisms defined in this document for mapping the required information elements between the two systems. Although this document describes mapping information elements from BIM to GIS in general, the primary concern of this document is mapping BIM models to GIS models for visualization.

The conceptual mapping mechanism defined in this document uses existing international standards such as Geography Markup Language (GML) (ISO 19136‑1^[1]) and Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) (ISO 16739‑1^[2]). The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)’s Land and Infrastructure Conceptual Model Standard (LandInfra) (OGC 15-111r1 ^[3]) defines the information model of infrastructure such as roads. As LandInfra has been designed with a common conceptual model between the BIM and GIS communities, transferring information from LandInfra BIM models to LandInfra GIS models is usually reasonably straightforward. This document, therefore, concentrates on mapping from BIM models not based on LandInfra.

1 Scope

This document defines the conceptual framework and mechanisms for mapping information elements from building information modelling (BIM) to geographic information systems (GIS) to access the required information based on specific user requirements.

The conceptual framework for mapping BIM information to GIS is defined with the following three mapping mechanisms:

BIM to GIS perspective definition (B2G PD);
BIM to GIS element mapping (B2G EM);
BIM to GIS level of detail (LOD) mapping (B2G LM).

This document does not describe physical schema integration or mapping between BIM and GIS models because the physical schema integration or mapping between two heterogeneous models is very complex and can cause a variety of ambiguity problems (see Annex D). Developing a unified information model between BIM and GIS is a desirable goal, but it is out of the scope of this document.

This document is applicable to the following concepts:

definition for BIM to GIS conceptual mapping requirement description;
definition of BIM to GIS conceptual mapping framework and component;
definition of mapping for export from one schema into another.

This document does not apply to the following concepts:

definition of any particular mapping application requirement and mechanism;
bi-directional mapping method between BIM and GIS;
definition of physical schema mapping between BIM and GIS;
definition of coordinate system mapping between BIM and GIS;
definition of relationship mapping between BIM and GIS;
implementation of the application schema.
NOTE For cases involving requirements related to geo-referencing for providing the position and orientation of the BIM model based on GIS, other standards exist such as ISO 19111^[4] and the Information Delivery Manual (IDM) from buildingSMART on Geo-referencing BIM.

2 Normative references

3 Terms and definitions

4 Abbreviated terms and notation

4.1 Abbreviated terms

4.2 UML notation

5 Conformance

6 Conceptual framework for BIM to GIS mapping

6.1 General

6.2 Conceptual overview

6.3 Mechanisms

7 BIM to GIS perspective definition

7.1 General

7.2 Mechanisms

8 BIM to GIS element mapping

8.1 General

8.2 Mechanism

9 BIM to GIS LOD Mapping

9.1 General

9.2 Mechanism

Bibliography

PD CEN ISO/TS 19166:2025

Geographic information — Building information modelling (BIM) to geographic information systems (GIS) conceptual mapping (B2GM)

Current

Published:

31 Dec 2025