Software Certification

Software Certification Program

As part of the global Compliance Program, the buildingSMART Software Certification program helps software vendors certify their applications against industry benchmarks to ensure international standards are implemented and used around the world. Certifications provide validation for Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) and BIM Collaboration Format (BCF) data exchanges, digital workflows and data quality to ensure work done in the built asset industry has the right assurance and quality for professionals to deliver their work.

Certifications help provide trust and support for clients, end-users and software vendors who want to support international standards and to ensure the industry can remain product and efficient.

In 2022, the Software Certification Program is undergoing a redevelopment. A software certification market analysis has been performed by bSI and the conclusions are being processed into a new IFC Software Certification setup. As a result, there will be more options for certification and validation of IFC data and related software. The aim is to make it more agile, modular and focused to enhance overall interoperability against the IFC schema as modernisation work continues against the Technical Roadmap.

In parallel, the Software Certification program will be extended with BCF Certification will be extended to be part of the Software Certification Program to enable better use of this standard for clash detection and issue resolution.

The result of the redevelopment means there will be three types of IFC software certification and validation as listed below.

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IFC Validation

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