IFC Concepts

Developed by buildingSMART, IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) is all about the sharing of information between project team members and across the software applications that they commonly use for design, construction, procurement, maintenance and operations. BuildingSMART has developed a common data schema (IFC) that makes the data interoperability possible to hold and exchange relevant data between different software applications.

IFC is an open, vendor-neutral BIM data repository for the information of building objects, including geometry, associated properties, and relationships, to facilitate:

Cross-discipline coordination of building information models for architecture, structural and building services.
Data sharing and exchange across IFC compliant applications.
Hand-over and reuse of data for analysis and other downstream tasks.

Additional information is available at buildingSMART, Industry Foundation Classes, the buildingSMART Standards Library