In the last three days we were at the buildingSMART International Summit in Paris. The Summit was hosted by Mediaconstruct France, the French Chapter of bSI. There was a lot of news, but above all, further groundbreaking decisions were made, which deeply integrate the standards of buildingSMART and thus make them more accessible for us users.

One highlight was certainly that Siemens and CCCC from China have now also become strategic members.

On the one hand, IFC is the International Friendship Club, but on the other hand friendship is not enough to get ahead. It is helpful in building consensus, but it was good this time that we made concrete progress.

We will have a coordinated process for localizing parts of IFC. The reason was that in Germany and Russia the chapters are doing a localization and these texts have to be managed cleanly by buildingSMART International and made openly accessible. This is on the right track.

In the specialist rooms, intensive work continued on the expansion of IFC for the areas of infrastructure.

IFC’s digital assets will become even more accessible as the essential elements will be moved to GitHub in the near future and will be open and freely accessible to the global development community. Especially the possibility to openly discuss issues with BIM developers from all over the world in GitHub – Issues is in my opinion a big step forward.

In the bSDD it is now foreseeable that the strategy of creating domain-specific areas within the bSDD that are populated by agents who have a clue about this domain will pay off. For example, ETIM has moved into the bSDD, so we can easily access this content when needed.

We presented the CAFM-Connect BIM profiles and they aroused great interest. It seems to me that we are on the right track here.

Many other decisions have been taken. It goes beyond the scope and my knowledge to list them here. They can be read by buildingSMART members.

The next summit is in Tokyo in autumn and then next spring in Düsseldorf.

Greetings from Thalys to Cologne and happy Easter.

Klaus Aengenvoort