FireBIMFireBIM

FireBIM Ontologies

The FireBIM Building Ontology (FBO) – the shared vocabulary that bridges national fire-safety regulations and building information models.

Every release is versioned and permanently available. Newest versions are listed first.

What is FBO?

FBO covers national fire-safety terms and their legal definitions and serves as a bridge between the terminology in regulatory documents and (BIM) modelling practice. Its core principle is an overarching European umbrella ontology (fbo:) with national sub-ontologies (fbo-be:, fbo-dk:, fbo-lt:, fbo-nl:, fbo-pt:, …) underneath it. National terms are linked to the umbrella concepts with fbo:isLinkedTo, which makes similarities and differences between countries explicit without overwriting local legal definitions.

IFC is deliberately not inferred by default. How a fire-safety concept is expressed in IFC is kept in a separate alignment module, the FBO → IFC mapping, so that modellers can follow the official mapping or use their own.

Vertical modularisation

One European umbrella, one module per country. Legal definitions stay national.

Versioned releases

Releases are identified as YYYY.MM.DD with a status (draft, candidate, stable, deprecated, withdrawn) – the same scheme as the FireBIM API.

Sync into the platform

app.firebim.org can pull these releases into your own FireBIM API with one click – no credentials needed to read this registry.

Core ontology

FBO – FireBIM Building Ontology (core)

fbo: <https://firebim.org/ontologies/fbo#>

umbrella

The European umbrella ontology. Country-agnostic fire-safety concepts (zones, elements, systems, functions, quantities, fire-safety properties) that the national modules link back to via fbo:isLinkedTo / fbo:hasSubitem.

1 version · newest first18 classes · 70 properties · 19 individuals
Browse latest version

National modules

FBO-BE – Belgium

fbo-be: <https://firebim.org/ontologies/fbo/be#>

national module

Belgian fire-safety vocabulary with legal definitions, regulation references and links to the core FBO concepts and to IFC.

2 versions · newest first21 classes · 42 properties · 9 individuals
Browse latest version

FBO-DK – Denmark

fbo-dk: <https://firebim.org/ontologies/fbo/dk#>

national module

Danish fire-safety vocabulary (BR18 and guidelines) with Danish and English labels and definitions, regulation references and links to the core FBO concepts and to IFC.

2 versions · newest first17 classes · 90 properties · 21 individuals
Browse latest version

FBO-LT – Lithuania

fbo-lt: <https://firebim.org/ontologies/fbo/lt#>

national module

Lithuanian fire-safety vocabulary with legal definitions, regulation references and links to the core FBO concepts and to IFC.

2 versions · newest first31 classes · 31 properties · 9 individuals
Browse latest version

FBO-NL – Netherlands

fbo-nl: <https://firebim.org/ontologies/fbo/nl#>

national module

Dutch fire-safety vocabulary (Bbl) with legal definitions, regulation references and links to the core FBO concepts and to IFC.

2 versions · newest first29 classes · 80 properties · 5 individuals
Browse latest version

FBO-PT – Portugal

fbo-pt: <https://firebim.org/ontologies/fbo/pt#>

national module

Portuguese fire-safety vocabulary with legal definitions, regulation references and links to the core FBO concepts and to IFC.

2 versions · newest first44 classes · 93 properties · 7 individuals
Browse latest version

Alignment modules

Official mappings from FBO to other standards. Other mappings may exist – in the FireBIM platform every user can maintain their own.

FBO → IFC 4.3 mapping

fbo-ifc: <https://firebim.org/ontologies/fbo/ifc#>

alignment

The official alignment module. Each named individual describes how an FBO term is expressed in IFC 4.3: IFC class and predefined type, property set and property, data type, expected value and whether it is a buildingSMART standard property.

1 version · newest first0 classes · 9 properties · 76 individuals
  • 2026.09.04draftLATESTissued 2026-09-0438 kB .ttltable
Open mapping table

For developers: the public registry API

Everything on this page is generated from a small set of static JSON and Turtle files. They are open, need no credentials, allow cross-origin requests and follow the URL structure of the FireBIM API (/ontologies/{family}/{country}/versions/{version}). Versions are always sorted newest first.

ResourceURL
Registry (all ontologies, all versions)https://firebim.org/documentation/ontologies/index.json
One ontology (summary)https://firebim.org/documentation/ontologies/{family}/{country}/index.json
Version listhttps://firebim.org/documentation/ontologies/{family}/{country}/versions.json
Version metadatahttps://firebim.org/documentation/ontologies/{family}/{country}/versions/{version}/metadata.json
Turtle filehttps://firebim.org/documentation/ontologies/{family}/{country}/versions/{version}/{file}.ttl
Parsed terms (used by this viewer)https://firebim.org/documentation/ontologies/{family}/{country}/versions/{version}/terms.json

latest and stable are not folders on this static site: read latest_version / latest_stable_versionfrom the summary and follow ttl_url. Each version carries a sha256 so a client can detect changes without downloading the Turtle.

# list everything
curl -s https://firebim.org/documentation/ontologies/index.json | jq '.ontologies[] | {ontology_family, country, latest_version}'

# download the latest FBO-DK release
curl -s https://firebim.org/documentation/ontologies/fbo/dk/index.json | jq -r .latest_ttl_url | xargs curl -sO

# sync into your own FireBIM API (authenticated; see the API docs)
curl -X POST https://api.firebim.org/ontologies/sync \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer <token>" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"source_url": "https://firebim.org/documentation/ontologies/index.json"}'

The sync endpoint of the FireBIM API accepts any source_url that serves an index in this format, so the same mechanism works for registries hosted elsewhere.