New Year Message

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2023 marked an exciting and highly successful year in buildingSMART’s history. buildingSMART is a global international standards body, with national chapters, members, partners and sponsors working as a community to enable the seamless exchange of trusted information across the built environment. We do this by developing open standards and services which enable digital workflows, thereby enhancing automation and decision-making, and leading to improved productivity, sustainability and profitability. Foremost amongst these is our flagship Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) standard, but this is increasingly supported by a wider ecosystem of open standards and services which make the adoption of openBIM® and streamlined digital workflows even easier.

2023 saw huge progress across many aspects of buildingSMART, which fall into three main focus areas:

  • Completing the openBIM Ecosystem.
  • Enabling openBIM adoption and use.
  • Evolving how we work as a community.

Some of the highlights in these focus areas are detailed below. These achievements provide a fantastic foundation for our business plan in 2024: to focus on delivering important Strategic Projects (in particular on Validation Service, Software Certification and Professional Certification), strengthening the communications and educational material available to users of openBIM® workflows, and expanding the work of our sector-based domains.

As a non-profit organisation, we are established to serve the needs of our industry by establishing an inclusive and consensus-based community to develop open standards and services. We can only operate with the generous support in both money and time of our members and sponsors. The fact that we achieved so much last year is testament to that support and I want to express my sincere gratitude to all of you who made this possible, be it by your active membership, providing project funding, contributing to committees, participating in domains, sponsoring events or by volunteering your precious time and effort. This is your community and these are your successes, setting us up for an equally impactful 2024 and beyond.

Completing the openBIM Ecosystem and planning the next-generation Standards:

  • IFC 4.3 was submitted to the ISO Final Draft International Standard vote (and approved on 3rd January 2024)
  • The vision was developed for the next-generation IFC 5 standard
  • The Information Delivery Specification was issued as a bSI Candidate Standard
  • bSDD was expanded to contain over 100 data dictionaries from over 75 organisations
  • Documents API was approved as a bSI Final Standard
  • The Validation Service was deployed successfully as a beta-variant, demonstrating the basis for future Software Certification

Enabling openBIM adoption and use:

  • Multiple domain projects were completed, advancing sector-based knowledge and implementation
  • A new Maritime domain was launched
  • Practitioner-level training and accreditation was launched as part of the Professional Certification program
  • Highly successful Summits were held in Rome and Lillestrøm
  • Well-received White Papers were published on topics such as Digital Twins
  • 15 awards and special mentions were issued to recognise international best practise in openBIM
  • Nine new international members joined
  • India, Brazil, Serbia and Iceland joined as chapters, giving bSI a presence in six continents
  • IFC-based openBIM mandates were announced by Finland, Singapore and Dubai

Evolving how we work as a community:

  • bSI’s Vision, Mission and Purpose were refreshed
  • Our Strategic Roadmap was launched following extensive consultation with members, domains and chapters
  • Strategic Projects were launched to manage the funding and delivery of key cross-domain standards and services
  • The Accelerator Program was launched to support organisations adopting openBIM, with its first Projects delivered
  • The Principal membership category was launched, aimed at asset owners with specific technical interests
  • Vendor engagement increased significantly ahead of the publication of new standards
  • Upgrades were made to our websites and other communications

As always, thank you for your support and please get in touch if you have ideas to share or wish to contribute to our work.

Clive

Posted in Blog