ABSTRACT
The international alliance for interoperability (IAI) has had wide industry support. The IAI recognized that a building project model must support the activities and processes carried out over all the different phases of the building lifecycle. A four-phase building lifecycle is employed, comprised of feasibility, design, construction and operation. The industry foundation classes (IFC) documentation provides three different views of the building model. Data model views for defining file or database definitions of the IFC are presented in EXPRESS and EXPRESS-G. The IFC organized into four layers. The bottom Resource Layer provides common resources used in defining the properties used by the upper layers. The second layer is the core layer. The third layer is the interoperability layer. The fourth layer is the domain-specific application layer. The Kernel schema defines the most abstract part of the IFC architecture. The IFC and other models can be used for many forms of data exchange.
