IFC open source and freeware summary

Various organizations collaborates with buildingSMART to support the idea of an open standard to share building information models - IFC. In order to ease the developments some have opted to provide open source developments or other freely available resources to the community. The following page lists those developments and wants to  acknowledge these contributions.

Open source BIMserver based on IFC

The Building Information Model server (short: BIMserver) enables you to centralize the information of a construction (or other building related) project. The core is based on the open standard IFC and therefore knows how to handle IFC files. The bimserver team is supported by TNO and TU Eindhoven, both from the Netherlands.

>>> read more about BIMserver

Open source IFC Tools for processing, visualization and 4D

Open source development using latest Java technology to include read/write IFC files, including a IFC loader for Java3D and a Boolean modeler. The first part of the tool set has been made available for download. The development team of the Open IFC Tools is based at the Bauhaus University Weimar, Germany and supported by the Bauhaus University and HOCHTIEF AG.

>>> read more about open IFC Tools

Open IFC read and write examples using different programming languages

Based on the IFC engine DLL a set of open read/write examples are provided for anyone to get familiar with the first steps on how to use IFC. A subset is published on this site as the "Hello Wall" tutorial. The IFC engine DLL is developed at TNO, Netherlands, and is made available freely for non-commercial usage.

>>> read more about Open IFC read/write examples

Freeware IFC SDK

The IFC SDK project provides a Software Development Kit (SDK) for reading and writing a Building Information Model (BIM) defined in Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) format. First version of the IFC SDK is provided in C++ programming language and is compliant with IFC 2X3 TC1 standard developed by buildingSMART International.

>>> read more about IFC SDK

Freeware IFC File Analyzer

The IFC File Analyzer generates an Excel spreadsheet from an IFC file. A worksheet is created for each type of entity where every row contains the attributes of an entity instance. Multiple IFC files can be analyzed at once to compare entity usage. The IFC File Analyzer is made available as freeware by NIST

>>> read more about IFC File Analyser

Freeware IFC syntax checker and viewer 

The IfcObjCounter analyses an IFC file against the IFC schema for syntax error and the FZKViewer visualizes the IFC file (geometrically and for property content), it also allows to read other open file formats. The tools are made available by Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Institute for Applied Computer Science.

>>> read more about FZKViewer and IfcObjCounter