IFC as part of class?

[Tom Klaber]

I am just starting to wrap my head around this - that for IFC exports to work - all objects need to have the proper IFC Data attached.  While I assume the smart objects come with automatically - we would need to add this for any custom built objects.

Does it make any sense for Classes to have the ability to come with IFC data?  This data could either overwrite object data - or more likely - the other way around - where any object could over-rule the class - but that way you could assign the data by class. 

 

I am a novice - so please tell me why this does not make any sense.  

[Art V]

IFC by class could make sense for generic IFC data, but you would still need to assign specific data to each object individually. The downside is that you will have to adjust your class setup to IFC categories/data because when you switch an object from one class to another, e.g. from build phase 1 to build phase 2, the generic IFC data may change as well if this IFC data is by class and different. That is something you may not want to happen in certain cases as it may affect your BIM model in a way you don't want and in that case you probably won't be using IFC by class after all for those objects. In that case you'd be better of to have this generic data to be attached to the object definition after all.

 

The "problem"  I see with BIM is that you have to anticipate as much as you can and set things up properly or it may become an unruly mess to deal with. This does to some extent limit flexibility as you want to minimize the number of variables for the sake of consistency.  So it will take a lot of communication between all participants to settle this.

Even then you need to account for different software capabilities and you don't want to have your by class setting to overwrite data from someone else on import. In the long run you might end up with data fragmentation, i.e. newly created objects having their IFC info by class and other objects in that class having different IFC info if your class structure does not perfectly align with the IFC info based structure.

 

Any standard for that matter does by definition impose some limits to flexibility as you'll need to squeeze things into something for the sake of interoperability/file or data exchange and this may not always fit your needs/wants.

 

 

Edited November 11, 2016 by Art V