Jeffrey Ouellette Named buildingSMART International's ISG Chair

[Lauren]

Jeffrey W. Ouellette, Assoc. AIA, IES, senior product specialist – architecture industry at global design software developer Vectorworks, Inc., has been appointed as Chair for buildingSMART International's Implementation Support Group (ISG). Created to support the various implementation and certification activities for buildingSMART standards, ISG discusses and promotes the use of Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) and the BIM Collaboration Format (BCF) for the exchange and sharing of Building Information Model (BIM) data among different software products.

Well-known to the buildingSMART community and a longtime ISG member, Ouellette began attending meetings on behalf of Vectorworks in 2009, becoming deputy chair in the fall of 2011. Together with buildingSMART colleagues, he has created and maintained the IFC-Compatible Implementation Database. Since joining ISG, Ouellette has been an advocate for openBIM standards among end users and the vendor community, trying to mediate the needs of all the parties. According to Ouellette, the future of the global building industry depends on the cooperation of all sides to create, implement and use solutions that ultimately make everyone’s work more effective and result in greater value.

As Chair, Ouellette's roles will include leading all group meetings and forums and representing the group during other buildingSMART discussions and events. Additionally, he will work with buildingSMART International's leadership on objectives to increase group membership and improve communication with end users.

"One major goal is to expand ISG membership and participation to include more vendors that claim support for IFC in their products. This ensures that their implementations are of the highest quality and compatible with the work of those who have been part of the ISG and its efforts for some time," said Ouellette.

ISG membership is open to all software companies that are members of a local or regional chapter or alliance of buildingSMART. Currently, ISG organizes regular in-person meetings during the spring and fall seasons, as well as conducts telephone or web virtual conferences to discuss implementation and support strategies. Representatives of large software companies, such Nemetschek brands including Vectorworks, Allplan, Scia, DDS, Solibri and GRAPHISOFT, as well as Autodesk, Bentley and Trimble, and smaller independent vendors including Progman Oy, IES Ltd. and Arkey Systems BV, regularly attend ISG meetings.

"The group’s highest priority for 2016 is to foster the implementation and certification of IFC4 support across the range of products that have been involved in the previous IFC2x3 certification process," said Ouellette. "As ISG Chair, I want to encourage uptake of IFC4 by even more software vendors as it significantly improves data exchanges for project coordination, as well as important parametric data to enable more advanced downstream modeling workflows. Additionally, we want increase the support for BCF to improve communications between collaborators about the model data."

To learn more about buildingSMART International's ISG, visit http://www.buildingsmart-tech.org/. Those interested in joining the group should email Jeffrey Ouellette at JOuellette@vectorworks.net.