ABSTRACT
The idea of an application neutral data model to facilitate the exchange of information between parties in a production chain arose somewhere in the seventies and eighties of the past century. In this period, right before the Internet revolution, the idea was often visualized to reside in the centre of a hub and spoke model to link up many applications at the perimeter. The physical exchange was symbolized by a floppy disk icon. It was also the time of huge standardizations efforts like IGES1 in the US and later ISO STEP (ISO10303)2
on the global level. The STEP effort was dominated by the aircraft construction and automotive industries while theAEC branch of industry played only a relative modest role. In the nineties this situation gave rise to the start of a new standardization development specifically aimed at the building and construction industry. A group of CAD vendors employed the underlying technology of the STEP standard as the foundation of IFC3. This consortium was later transformed to an
independent alliance, which is now known under the name building SMART.
