Industry experts, technology innovators, and openBIM implementers from around the globe discuss the future development of IFC 5 at the latest General Assembly of Implementers meeting
Graphisoft hosted the latest General Assembly of Implementers meeting on February 5-6, 2025, at Graphisoft Park in Budapest, Hungary.
Graphisoft CEO Daniel Csillag opened the two-day event with 40+ active participants from 19 countries.
Industry Foundation Classes 5
The next generation of the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) standard, is aimed at simplifying and improving data exchange in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) sector.
After a morning of updates and discussions around buildingSMART’s standards and solutions, the attendees split into several sub-groups for an IFC 5 hackathon.
Focus areas for the groups included workflows, properties, materials, alignment, and georeferencing.
Key outcomes included:
- Agreement on principles and scope of IFC 5
- First demonstrations of IFC 5 data shared between multiple software tools
- A roadmap for the next 6 months of development
Holger Kreienbrink, director of product intelligence and partnerships at Graphisoft, said: “It was a pleasure to host the gathering of so many passionate people from the world’s top AEC/O software developers.
“These meetings show that by working through buildingSMART, even competitors can move forward together on the shared goal of interoperability. IFC 5 will be a big step forward and opens new possibilities.”
Léon van Berlo, technical director at buildingSMART International, said: “The principle of IFC 5 is that multiple users contribute pieces of data to the overall dataset.
“It was wonderful to see everyone contributing to parts of the overall IFC 5 definition in a place that has so much history for IFC. Working on the ‘rebirth of IFC’ in the same location that contributed so much to the original principles was very special.”
