Education and Training for New IFC users

Developers
1

I’m looking for feedback on how software companies and university researchers go about educating and training new IFC users. Lets say you’ve added a bright new person to your team to work on implementing products or doing research projects using IFC and yet they have little to no experience with the concepts and details of the IFC specifications.

How do you teach them about concept templates, spatial structures, objectified relationships, product shape representations, product placement and the hierarchy of local placements and coordinate systems, property sets, and the list goes on?

Do you email them a link to the IFC specification and tell them to start reading? Are there standard texts and references available that present the concepts and details in small digestible chunks? Do university professors teach classes covering the IFC specifications? Do software companies send their people to training, conduct inhouse training, rely on one-on-one mentoring?

Perhaps a graduate student or a new employee at a software company can chime in and share their experience learning the IFC specification and putting it to use in their endeavors.

Now that IFC 4x3 supports infrastructure, I would guess that there is a completely new population of engineers, scientists, and developers that are looking to embrace IFC and openBIM and may struggle to do so.

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2

Have you checked the Educational bSI portal? https://education.buildingsmart.org/

3

Thank you for the suggestion. I was more looking for something that gets down to the details of the IFC specification for software developers. I was able to find some good guidance at IFC Implementation Guidance - buildingSMART Technical

4

Hi Rick. We use the “IFC 2x Edition 3 Model Implementation Guide” to familiarize developers with the IFC schema. Everyone agrees it’s the best guide. https://standards.buildingsmart.org/documents/Implementation/IFC2x_Model_Implementation_Guide_V2-0b.pdf
This document that I’m linking to also seems very interesting for learning about the schema https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327760097_Industry_Foundation_Classes_A_Standardized_Data_Model_for_the_Vendor-Neutral_Exchange_of_Digital_Building_Models

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5

@nmartin - thank you, that is very helpful.