It would be an understatement to say that there is some confusion in the market regarding how construction product manufacturers should be using IFC. This is partly due to the fact that ‘BIM community’ terms like IFC, COBie, IFD, IDM are still very obscure to the general public and the initiatives to use ‘plain language’ when describing everything BIM are still in their earliest stages.
Manufacturers have increasingly begun to understand that in order to digitise a product one needs to communicate its characteristics as standard-based ‘properties’. Here is where confusion starts as IFC, which is sometimes equated with ‘the BIM format’, allows for the use of ‘properties’ and has embedded them within its logic. Here is how manufacturers come to the conclusion that…