In late 2014, RAKLI (the Finnish Association of Building Owners and Construction Clients) and the Finnish Terminology Centre TSK launched a project to prepare a single and consistent terminology in which key common concepts of the real estate and construction sector could be collected. The aim of the project was to agree upon key concepts used in this sector, laying the foundation for semantic and technical interoperability of information systems and registers.

The goal of this project was to specify common real estate and construction sector concepts in a broad-based cooperation, ensuring that the recommendations issued in the terminology would be suitable for use by all stakeholders in the sector. The common concepts support all types of communications, whether between authorities or in daily interactions associated with property management. The terminology will also help citizens in their own information searches. The central government’s task is to coordinate different terminology needs related to the built environment and incorporate the results in the public administration’s enterprise architecture. The terminology will also be used for such purposes as drafting legislation and directives.

Over the years, the stakeholders in the real estate and construction sector have prepared several terminologies in cooperation with the Finnish Terminology Centre TSK, and the first step of this project thus was collecting and pruning the material. Overlaps in old terminology lists and their links to ontologies were then compared, and the concepts considered the most central were selected for the new terminology.

The work on the KIRA terminology continues in the KIRA-digi project. The terminology and nomenclature work was led by the Standardisation industry group of Building Smart Finland, which was extended to the public administration. The objectives of the project include expanding the terminology, investigating interoperability between Nordic and European terminologies and nomenclatures, harmonising nomenclatures and producing a building information ontology.

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