Construction, Cities & Territories (CCT) is a fragmented industry with several different CAD software and data standards to create and represent building and infrastructure models. Data exchange among stakeholders is therefore a critical issue. Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) is one of the major efforts to facilitate interoperability among stakeholders. Developed by buildingSMART (formally known as IAI), IFC is a platform-neutral, open file format specification. It is an object-based file format intended to facilitate interoperability in the CCT industry, and is a commonly used collaboration format in building information modeling (BIM) based projects.
In March 2013, IFC4 was released with many changes in scope, entities and data representations. In particular, IFC4 supports geographical information in which a design can be linked to a GIS coordinate system and vice versa.
In IFC4, the geographical information in a design is captured in two new entities: IfcProjectedCRS and IfcMapConversion. The attribute values of entity IfcProjectedCRS indicates the local engineering coordinate system of the project. The attribute values of entity IfcMapConversion allows the conversion of the local origin of the local engineering coordinate system to its place within a map (easting, northing, orthogonal height) and to rotate the x-axis of the local engineering coordinate system within the horizontal plane of the map. An example is in the figure below:
Preserving the geographical information of a design is necessary to maintain the integrity of the IFC file. Beginning in R2021x FD03, the ENOVIA Converter for IFC app will preserve the geographical information of a design when IFC files are imported to or exported from 3DEXPERIENCE.
When importing an IFC4 file, the coordinate reference system information defined on the root product in the IFC4 file will be available in the “geolocation information” of the root product.
On export from the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, the coordinate reference system (CRS) defined on the root product will be exported to the IFC4 file.
For more information about ENOVIA Converter for IFC as well as other available converter, please visit www.3ds.com.
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