SCOTTSDALE, AZ, Oct 5, 2018 – Open Design Alliance (ODA), developer of interoperability, visualization and other foundational technology for the CAD industry, announced that it has started work on a new toolkit for the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) data model.
“The work done by buildingSMART to create and promote IFC is commendable,” commented Neil Peterson, ODA president. “IFC is universally accepted as the exchange standard for BIM. However, IFC has not fully solved the problem of BIM interoperability. There are many competing implementations of IFC that often take the form of research projects or minimally supported open source libraries. In addition, there are inconsistencies among various implementations that can cause problems during data exchange.
“There is a strong need for a universal, high-quality IFC implementation backed by a professional development organization. ODA is ideally suited to meeting this need. We have strong experience with BIM from our development of Autodesk Revit file interoperability solutions; we are a non-profit technology consortium with broad support among the CAD industry; and our primary focus as an organization is software development.”
Sergey Vishnevetsky, ODA Development director, said, “IFC is a complex project. While basic data access is straightforward, a complete implementation of IFC requires a number of sophisticated components including a facet modeler, graphics engine and boundary representation support. ODA is perhaps the only organization in the industry with open versions of these required technologies.
“Our solution will be an open, general-purpose IFC toolkit, with full data access and creation support, integrated high-speed visualization, and options for converting IFC data to other formats such as .dwg. It will be available to all ODA members as part of our standard membership package.”
About Open Design Alliance
Open Design Alliance is a non-profit technology consortium that provides high-value SDKs for developers of engineering applications. Their product portfolio includes solutions for interoperability, visualization, publishing, and CAD editing. It runs on all common desktop, mobile and web platforms. For more information, see www.opendesign.com.
