News

buildingSMART IFC: Call for IFC2x4 Beta3 Release Review

Feb 01 2010

buildingSMART IFC: An additional review period has been added due to significant comments received on beta 2. Hence, a call for IFC2x4 beta3 release review. Deadline for IFC2x4 beta3 review is March 12, 2010. See an updated road map for the IFC2x4 deelopment period.

We look for all issues that can be raised, particularly however for improvements of the documentation and clarity of reading the specification, and for consistency among the various definitions in IFC. So please don't hesitate to also log issues when the documentation is not clear, unambiguous or missing clarity, or when you feel, that different ways of modeling have been used for the same concept. Also, please note that the IFC2x4 beta3 release marks the feature freeze and major schema update freeze for IFC2x4.

The IFC2x4 beta3 release can be characterized as:

The IFC 2x edition 4 release (IFC2x4), combines a number of feature increases with some major rework and improvements of the existing IFC specification. It has been developed as the next basis for IFC enabled interoperability of Building Information Models. It is also intended that the IFC2x4 release will be submitted to the International Standardization Organization (ISO) for approval as a full International Standard ISO16739.
See the "Whats' new" section for a quick overview and the "IFC2x4 beta2 change log" for a detailed register of all changes. See the IFC2x4 beta3 announcement and follow the links for online access or download.
For more information visit the official technical website of buildingSMART.

The major improvements in IFC2x4 beta3 (compared with beta2) include (among others):

First publication of multi-lingual property sets that can be used to localize IFC property set content, currently translations exist for spatial and building elements in French and German, see e.g. online for a quick reference. We would like encourage other chapters and interested parties to contribute to further translations!
The IFC object definition (occurrence and type objects) inheritance tree is now synchronized and the concept of providing a predefined type enumeration is consistently applied—with only a few noted exceptions (and more work expected until IFC2x4 final). The IFC object definition inheritance tree represents the "built-in" IFC object catalog (or classification) and can be used to map external classifications to and from.
The process and cost element definitions have been improved and optimized in order to reduce the model footprint, when exchanging 4D and 5D BIM. It is expected that an equivalent dataset in IFC2x4 is only 50% of the size, compared with IFC2x3 (and probably down to 20%, when using ifcXML compared to ifcXML2x3). Switching to ISO 8601 date and time strings (identical with XSD datatypes) also streamlines ifcXML in future.
More usage guidelines and illustrations are added to better explain the proper use of IFC constructs in implementations, therefore you find a number of new instantiation diagrams.

The www.iai-tech.org website has a news section that will point you to the IFC2x4 beta3 page and other material. Recent interesting updates include:

Results of the recent survey on acceptance and usage of IFC, go online for a summary.

The new www.iai-tech.org site is using a content management system and authorization tool. We ask people downloading IFC, the ifcXML implementation guide, or other future documents to register for free. This would enable us to send you update notifications. The email addresses will not be forwarded or used in any other way.

How to get involved: