EN-ISO 19650 and openBIM: simplebim®, the IFC editor, in the service of information management

An international standard for BIM information management

Published by ISO and adopted as a European standard (EN-ISO 19650), the 19650 series defines how a project's BIM information must be produced, exchanged and archived: the roles of each party, information delivery calendars, the common data environment (CDE) and information requirements at each milestone. Far from imposing a piece of software, the standard imposes a framework for reliable, traceable information sharing.

buildingSMART Spain, the Spanish member of buildingSMART International, has published a series of guides and templates to support the application of EN-ISO 19650: an introductory guide, responsibility matrices for design, construction and operation phases, document naming conventions and deliverable registers. These resources underline an essential point: it is the quality and consistency of the information exchanged that make a BIM project succeed.

IFC, the foundation of openBIM

openBIM relies on open formats, foremost among them the IFC format (Industry Foundation Classes), developed by buildingSMART. Thanks to IFC, a model produced in one design tool can be read, checked and used by every project stakeholder, whatever their software.

In practice, the IFC models received come from heterogeneous tools and modellers of varying rigour: missing or duplicated properties, absent classifications, inconsistent object names, superfluous data. Yet ISO 19650 requires every information deliverable to be complete, justified and usable by whoever receives it. Without processing, raw IFC does not always meet that commitment.

simplebim®, an IFC editor

This is where simplebim® comes in: the software is a true IFC editor. Where most tools merely visualise the model, simplebim® opens the IFC file, modifies it and saves it back as IFC, without any round-trip through the original design software.

Concretely, the BIM team can:

• clean the models: remove superfluous objects and properties, correct faulty units, names and geometries;
• standardise the data: apply common naming, classification and property rules to every IFC received, whatever its source;
• enrich the information: add trade-specific properties, classifications and quantities through reusable configuration templates;
• deliver controlled IFC files, compliant with the information requirements defined up front, ready to be shared in the common data environment.

The connection, in practice

openBIM, in practice

EN-ISO 19650 and openBIM share the same goal: trustworthy information, shared by everyone. simplebim® fits fully into this logic: by editing the IFC itself, it makes the model genuinely compliant with what the standard expects of an information deliverable. IFC stops being a mere export format and becomes the carrier of the project's shared information, from design through to operation.

To learn more about the standard, see the EN-ISO 19650 resources from buildingSMART Spain, available in Spanish, Catalan, Italian and English.