From 3 to 5 September 2025 Reincarnate took part in CISBAT2025, an international scientific conference hosted at EPFL Lausanne and the Smart Living Lab in Fribourg. Providing a platform for interdisciplinary dialogue on the sustainable transformation of the built environment, the 2025 edition focused on operation, well-being, and circularity, combining scientific sessions with technical visits in Lausanne and Fribourg.
Our partner DEMO Consultants, represented by Yu Hsiu T.— the first author and a former researcher at DEMO—participated in this event with a paper titled “IFC Whisperer: Querying Building Information Models with Large Language Models and IFC-based Knowledge Graphs.
Developed within our Horizon Europe-funded project, this research introduces a framework that transforms Building Information Models (BIM) into graph-structured representations, enabling advanced querying, reasoning, and analysis of building data. The paper was co-authored by Samaneh Rezvani, Fatemeh Asgharzadeh, Maurijn Neumann, and Timo Hartmann., and will be published by IOP in November.
Buildings are not just collections of parts but interconnected systems of materials, components, and technologies that interact across their lifecycle. The IFC Whisperer captures these relationships through knowledge graphs, making it possible to:
- Map dependencies between building elements
- Evaluate lifecycle performance and opportunities for material reuse
- Detect hidden patterns across building systems
- Enable intuitive, natural language queries on sustainability data
This innovation strengthens our commitment to circularity in construction, providing tools to better understand material flows, design for reuse, and reduce lifecycle impacts.
We thank the CISBAT organizers for creating such a rich space for interdisciplinary exchange. Insights from the conference will continue to guide our work as we test and apply innovative approaches across 11 demonstrators in Europe and China, driving forward a truly circular built environment.
👉 Learn more about Reincarnate: www.reincarnate-project.eu