On Thursday, November 27, 2025, Phillip Schönfelder successfully defended his dissertation titled “From Floor Plans to Building Knowledge: Automatic Drawing Analysis for Semantic Information Extraction”.

In his research, he advanced automated interpretation of construction drawings by tackling three core tasks: extracting textual information from plans with high accuracy, detecting fire-safety equipment in evacuation drawings, and developing an ontology that structures and links all detected elements into a unified semantic model. These contributions demonstrate how key information contained in traditional drawings can be captured, interpreted, and made usable in digital building representations.

The dissertation was supervised by Prof. Markus König, with additional guidance from Prof. Frédéric Bosché during a research stay at the University of Edinburgh. Prof. Ekaterina Petrova and Prof. Roger Sauer served as reviewers and members of the defense committee.

We sincerely congratulate Phillip on his doctorate and wish him continued success in his professional path and personal journey.