Many projects concerning the protection, conservation, restoration, and dissemination of cultural heritage are being carried out around the world due to its growing interest as a driving force of socio-economic development. The existence of reliable, digital three-dimensional (3D) models that allow for the planning and management of these projects in a remote and decentralized way is currently a growing necessity. There are many software tools to perform the modeling and complete three-dimensional documentation of the intervened monuments. However, the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) sector has adopted the Building Information Modeling (BIM) standard over the last few decades due to the progress that has been made in its qualities and capabilities. The complex modeling of cultural heritage through commercial BIM software leads to the consideration of the concept of Heritage BIM (H-BIM), which pursues the modeling of architectural elements, according to artistic, historical, and constructive typologies. In addition, H-BIM is considered to be an emerging technology that enables us to understand, document, advertize, and virtually reconstruct the built heritage. This article is a review of the existing literature on H-BIM and its effective implementation in the cultural heritage sector, exploring the effectiveness and the usefulness of the different methodologies that were developed to model families of elements of interest.

The current approaches for the built heritage documentation and modelling are to collecting, organizing and integrating immovable assets' data into a single graphic-semantic structure using BIM tools. This is the key issue to shifting from point clouds to HBIM. Although fully automation is not possible, practical approaches for the conversion of point clouds into HBIM elements grouped in libraries have recently appeared to meet the particular characteristics of historic buildings in an equivalent way to the libraries of elements already available for contemporary building and civil works. In spite of the graphic information on the built heritage elements is semantically rich in itself, linking the families of modelled elements with the Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) as worldwide well-known controlled vocabulary, allows not only the automation but the consistency in cataloguing of required elements, as well as more efficient retrieval of information in a standardized way. This so useful graphic-semantic linking is particularly applied to the Castle of Torrelobatón to make up the HBIM meaningful set of fundamental elements of the defensive architecture from the Middle Age to the Renaissance in Europe, of which this Castle is a representative example.