Open Source IFC Frameworks : some experiences

I have been looking at programming Frameworks for IFC (Industry Foundation Classes), the open standard to exchange Building Information Models. I assume you are at least aware of what they are and what they contain…

While most commercial BIM software currently exports and opens IFC documents, I was interested to learn about actually doing something directly with these files, e.g. analyzing and visualizing or even generating them.

There are a few free IFC viewers available. Tekla BIMsight and Solibri Viewer are both recommended (the latter even cross-platform). But they are closed and can not be adapted for other purposes. However, I also read about a few interesting Open Source projects for creating and opening IFC files.

• BIMserver : http://bimserver.org
• ifcOpenShell : http://ifcopenshell.org
• ifcGears : http://ifcgears.com
• IFC-SDK : http://www.osor.eu/projects/ifc-sdk
• Open IFC Tools : http://www.openifctools.org