buildingSMART International
The industry body that stewards the open standards behind openBIM — IFC, BCF, IDS and more.
buildingSMART International is the worldwide industry body driving the digital transformation of the built environment by creating and maintaining open, international standards for BIM interoperability. It is, in effect, the steward of openBIM — the vendor-neutral way of working that the rest of this glossary keeps pointing back to.
It looks after the whole family of standards. IFC is the neutral data schema for exchanging models; BCF is the format for exchanging issues; IDS is the computable specification of information requirements; the IDM and MVD define information-exchange processes and the model subsets that serve them; the buildingSMART Data Dictionary (bSDD) shares agreed terms and definitions; and the openCDE APIs connect it all.
Its purpose is neutrality: because the standards are vendor-neutral, data can move between different platforms while teams keep full freedom over their workflows. buildingSMART also runs a two-level professional certification — Foundation and Practitioner (openBIM Management and Coordination) — delivered locally through national chapters. In Italy that chapter is buildingSMART Italy, which offers openBIM training in Italian. The term openBIM is used as-is in Italian (occasionally rendered BIM aperto).
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