beta3 release summary

Release Notes

The purpose of the IFC2x Edition 4 is to enhance the capability of the IFC specification in several areas of building elements, building service elements and structural elements and accompanying basic definitions. It also corrects several known technical problems found since the release of the IFC2x Edition 3 specification and to improve the documentation generally. Some elements that have been deprecated in earlier releases have been removed or adjusted.

A "What's new in IFC2x4 beta3" section is added to the specification for a quick overview of major changes, the "IFC2x3 TC1 to IFC2x4 beta3 change log" should be consulted for more details. Please also look into the "IFC2x3 TC1 to IFC2x4 list of deprecated elements".

Purpose of the beta3 release

The beta3 release is the functionality and major schema change freeze for IFC2x4.

The purpose of publishing the IFC2x4 beta3 release is to further encourage the international buildingSMART community to provide feedback and issue reports in order to increase quality and implementability of the next IFC release. The focus of the feedback should be to fix still existing bugs and inconsistencies between the various parts of the IFC schema and to improve documentation and to drive out ambiguity in definitions. However no major schema changes are acceptable for the upcoming release candidates. Any comments about the ease of use and examples to demonstrate the use of IFC concepts that could be incorporated are highly appreciated.
 

Invitation for review

We invite all interested parties to review and comment on the IFC2x4 beta3 release. See "how to use the issue database" on details for registration and usage of the issue database, if you are registered already go directly to the IFC Review Issue Database. The IFC2x4 beta3 review process has started on 30. Jan 2010 and is expected to close on 12. March 2010.