bSI Rotterdam Summit overview

April 11th to 14th were a very busy and productive few days for the buildingSMART community and this Spring Summit produced some excellent outcomes. The work was done by 175 representatives from all 17 of our worldwide Chapters. It seemed appropriate that the Netherlands motto is stronger through effort.

Rijkswaterstaat delivered the clients perspective on the need for open standards and ARUP gave us the view from the Strategic Advisory Council telling us that buildingSMART are best placed to host open BIM. They also laid down the scale of the challenge explaining that by the 22nd century we need to builld more cities than currently exist today.

We were honoured to meet with the party from China BIM Rail Alliance and learn about the 30,000 kilometres of railway to be laid in the next four years in a digital environment. They confirmed that they will be submitting an application to publish their IFC Rail work as a bSI PAS (publicly available specification). This will complement the IFC Road PAS application already received from Korea.

Schiphol Airport explained their client mandate for using open, non proprietary BIM standards and we welcome their desire to form a buildingSMART aviation group.

SAC members Kajima Corporation, HOK, ARUP, Autodesk & Nemetschek Group were there in force as well as bSI Board members representing client, architects, engineers and contractor requirements.  New Rooms to represent the User needs are being advised and we welcome the commitment to drive these forwards.

It was emphasized that Standards are not our only product and that solutions development is equally important. The SAC Task Groups; Marketing IFC today and IFC for increasing data parameters were launched as well as continuing work on the bSDD Task Force and the proposal for DfMA / Lean construction.

The People Compliance activity received a good boost with contributions from the UK, Norway, Korea and Spain describing their regional approaches. The stage is now set to deliver the outcome whereby buildingSMART is the global brand and assurance in BIM competence certification.

Partner organisation OGC discussed with us how Geospatial, Civil Engineering & BIM come perfectly together in the Urban environment and are destined to work together.

There was great collaboration between the Rooms during the summit with many shared meetings driving harmonization across the standards during the development stage. This no doubt will make the work of the Standards Committee Technical Executive easier at the gateway decision points.

We now have 34 Standard Development activities in progress, 9 published final standards, 4 special purpose projects and 2 PAS applications.

Thank-you to all that attended and made this yet another special and productive event. We look forward to seeing you all on Jeju Island in September.

More can be seen on Twitter using #bSIsummit16