buildingSMART’s Technical progress

buildingSMART has just completed a very successful Standards Summit in Rotterdam which was well attended and had many positive outcomes. The standards process itself is being refined and developed as it is used and implemented and we have welcomed two new Chapters this year from Switzerland and the USA.
In all this work and activity, it is important not to lose focus on technical progress.

IFC Schema is available as ISO Standard 16739 and our primary immediate milestone is to enable use of the new IFC4 capabilities and, of course to expand these.
The IFC was upgraded to IFC4 add1 and is a new work item in ISO. Two broad enabling MVDs have been developed and published as bSI Final Standards;
• IFC4 Design Transfer View
• IFC4 Reference View
Certification based on these MVDs is due to start summer 2016.

IFC for Infrastructure is also showing tremendous progress and has committed further development plans.
• IFC4 Alignment for Infrastructure is a bSI Final Standard
• Funded projects setting work programs for IFC for Road, for Rail and for Infrastructure Asset management are in hand.
• The infrastructure work plan is available here

Making it easy to working with IFC is one of our key challenges. To assist users, we have developed a Change Coordination standard
• BIM Collaboration Format (BCF) is a bSI Final Standard

The buildingSMART Data Dictionary (bSDD) tool (to help digitally define everything in the whole world!) is being developed to allow a dynamic extension of IFC approved entities, types, property and quantity sets, to comply with local, regional and national needs. See the explanatory video on bSI’s YouTube channel

Of course there is much more to do and we must focus in particular on improving documentation for users but we should also keep a clear focus on the progress in hand.
Looking ahead we are opening up more flexible approaches for dynamically creating and providing a broad range of ‘solutions’ for users ahead of standardization itself.