Industry Foundation Classes (IFC)

IFC is an open, neutral standard developed by buildingSMART International for Building Information Modeling (BIM) data exchange. It enables interoperability between different AEC (Architecture, Engineering, and Construction) software. IFC data is typically encoded following the ISO 10303-21 STEP Physical File (SPF), XML- or HTML-file format, but its content (schema) is unique to IFC.

🔍 See 3D Data Concepts for details and definitions.

Versions

  • IFC2x3: The most widely used version, with support for basic geometry, topology, and spatial structure.

  • IFC4: Adds support for advanced geometry, topology, spatial structure, and semantic annotations.

  • IFC4x3: Extends IFC4 with additional features for infrastructure and building services.

  • IFC5: This upcoming version is expected to improve support for advanced geometry, topology, spatial structure, and semantic annotations.

Extensions

  • .ifc: IFC-specific data with BIM-specific entries encoded in SPF format

Structure

TBD

Geometry

Tesselation

TBD

B-Rep

B-Rep elements are supported.

PMI & Model Views

TBD

Metadata

TBD

External Resources

buildingSMART


Did you find this page useful? Please give it a rating:
Thank you for rating this page!
Any issues or feedback?
What kind of problem would you like to report?
Please tell us more about what's wrong: