IFC 4.3 is an ISO standard - is there value in purchasing the ISO documents?

Developers
1

I have two questions:

  1. Now that IFC 4.3 is an ISO standard, is there any value in purchasing the standard from ISO? Does it provide any information that is not already provided online by bSI?

  2. The IFC 4.3 documentation refers to other ISO standards, such as 10303. Do the ISO documents for these dependent standards provide more detailed information than the IFC documentation?

At a cost of over $600 for one standard, I’m not eager to purchase ISO documents if they don’t provide anything more than we get from bSI.

2

The publishing agreement buildingSMART has with ISO is that you “can” buy the ISO version, but it would not give you anything you didn’t already have with the buildingSMART publication. They are identical (content-wise).

The ISO version (the one I reviewed at CEN/TC 442 standard committee), is an exported HTML from the same source as the original buildingSMART repository.

So I wouldn’t bother, if I were you.

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3

Thanks for the reply. Can you comment on the value of purchasing the normative reference standard 10303 from ISO? Would it add value and information not in the bSI document?

4

For my work part 11 and part 21 are indispensable. I’ve also used part 28 and part 26. Part 42 would probably be a good to have in addition to the text we get from bSI, but I haven’t purchased/seen it. I think for most developers interacting with a pre-existing toolkit the documentation that bSI provides is sufficient though.

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