About Us

MSG stands for Model Support Group, i.e. the dedicated group inside buildingSMART International that is responsible for the development and maintenance of its technical standards, the IFC specification and related specifications. The Industry Foundation Classes IFC are the main technical deliverable of buildingSMART in order to fulfill its goal to promote open and interoperable IT standards to support the process change within the construction and facility management industries. IFC are central to the vision of buildingSMART:

• “buildingSMART is integrated project working and value-based life cycle management using Building Information Modelling and IFCs”. Definition by buildingSMART from 02-Nov-06

The main objective of MSG is to continuously develop, improve and maintain the IFC specification and to support its implementation in IFC compatible software. See the current IFC development roadmap for the actual status of IFC development. In addition, MSG is responsible for coordinating the Model View Definitions MVD i.e. the definition of subsets of IFC to support certain data exchange and sharing use cases, or exchange requirements.

Related specifications, such as the Information Delivery Manual, IDM, and the International Framework for Dictionaries, IFD, are also supported by MSG in collaboration with other teams. In particular the correspondence between these definitions and the underlying IFC standard is overlooked by MSG.

MSG work tasks

• Technical development road map for the IFC specification including setting strategic technical goals and IFC specification architecture
• Consolidation and final integration of new model specification requirements put forward by IFC extension projects
• Continuous work to maintain the IFC model specification, improve its documentation, its property set content
• Maintain an issue resolution database, comment on incoming issues and resolve them at the next appropriate IFC model specification release
• Work on the necessary accompanying documents, implementation guides, model guides, tutorials, reader guide, and others.
• Support the work of the ISG Implementation Support Group and help with the publishing of implementer agreements
• Work with other IAI groups and support the IFD, IDM and MVD activities, look after its impact to the IFC model specification integrity
• Work with other external standardization groups to harmonize IFC definitions with other ISO standard deliverables
• General MSG coordination activities, including regular meetings and webconferences

MSG members

New members in MSG are proposed by the current group and endorsed by the relevant buildingSMART technical body, ITM. They are required to be experts in data modeling with an AEC industry background and contribute to the various MSG work tasks. Currently the membership includes:

• Thomas Liebich (MSG lead)
• Yoshinobu Adachi
• Havard Bell
• Peter Bonsma
• Tim Chipman
  
• Kjetil Espedokken
  
• Jim Forester
• Andreas Geiger
  
• Juha Hyvarinen
• Nick Nisbet
• Stefan Richter
• Richard See