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Activity Summary
This article describes Safe Software’s participation in the BIM Fit Check validation and certification exercise with Building Smart Germany. The goal of this exercise was for participants to test IFC reading, writing, and interoperability.
The two primary use cases focused on were georeferencing and alignments.
- Georeferencing corresponds to accurately positioning data on the earth's surface and preserving georeferencing information on the data during reading or writing. This is essential to support combining different datasets, such as when different participants collaborate on the same project.
- Alignments involve reading and writing linear objects and their geometries, which are necessary to support alignment objects such as rail, roads, and pipelines. This feature type is essential to transportation and energy infrastructure.
Each participant was given a range of tasks to complete the project. The results were assessed by a panel of experts and evaluated using the Building Smarts IFC validator. Overall, this effort promotes BIM interoperability and gives us an ideal context to test and improve IFC support.
Participants in the BIM Fit Check 2025 presented their solutions to the tasks set for the use cases “BIM and georeferencing” and “axis exchange” live to an expert audience at the buildingSMART International Summit 2025 in Berlin. Afterwards, the digital badge from buildingSMART Germany and a certificate were awarded.
See BIM Fit Check for more information.
Use Case Examples
A number of examples are attached to demonstrate how FME supports writing IFC for the two use cases: georeferencing and alignments. Source data is also provided. Simply download and run the templates or download the source datasets to inspect them for yourself.