Given that ‘ISO 7817 Part 3 will be a standard on a schema to enable a machine-readable definition of the level of information need framework’, has bSI ever mentioned a connection with the IDS standard?
Recently, @berlotti shared an execellent set slides during the Q&A of his webinar about IDS using VENN diagrams to show overlappings between the different Information Requirement frameworks.
buildingSMART International has a liaison with CEN/TC 442 (the committee where the ISO 7817 series is developed). They are invited to join the meetings of the related working groups.
Rest assured that the people in this CEN working group (myself included) are conscious about IDS and we look at its position towards the level of information need standard. We’ve also received questions from reviewers to clarify the relation between both approaches, which have a related but different scope.
I’ll leave it to buildingSMART to clarify their viewpoint.
Thanks, Stefan.
Let’s wait for some additional comments from bSI here, too.
I’m heading to Berlin for CEN/TC 442 working groups and to discuss the ISO 7817 standard. I’m still waiting for input by buildingSMART, to be honest.
IDS is not the same as level of information need and the plan is to continue with ISO 7817-3 as a machine-interpretable standard exchange format.
I personally can imagine that future toolings will allow for the extraction of an IDS file from a requirements specification, confirming the usefulness of IDS when related to an IFC dataset. But I also believe that for most practical purposes, this wouldn’t involve any files, but rather the exchange of data according to a standard scheme, using APIs, not unlike BCF.
@stefkeB Thanks for the feedback. This is something (requirements harmonisation) that the new EU openBIM Forum is already working on. Maybe Steen Sunesen can speed up some steps in the same direction.
Regardless of whether it is file-based or through API, and the scope difference between what IDS covers and what 7817-3 is aimed at, I think there is a need to identify in a less blurred way the overlaps between them (the VENN diagrams the @berlotti showed are a good starting point).
I would like to get more feedback on this, but so far buildingSMART is silent about it. So we continue with ISO 7817-3 aligning ourselves to ISO published standards and only making a cursory reference to IDS as it exists in its own universe, outside of ISO (for now?).
The diagram from the video Léon shared was nice, but that hasn’t been discussed within the CEN or ISO committee, so for now, this is not a confirmed interpretation.
Again, to stress this: the scope of ISO 7817 goes broader than merely alphanumeric information requirements and it isn’t constraint to only the IFC schema. IDS requires that every requirement and applicability are set against the IFC schema. We all know that the schema is not perfect, never fully complete.
Hi Stefke and David
This post on the bSI webpage for IDS might be of interest:
IDS, unlike most other information requirement standards, is strictly tied to the IFC data schema. It enables unambiguous interpretation and automatic compliance checking, providing identical results in all checking software. IDS is limited to alphanumeric information, meaning values of properties, quantities, classifications, materials and relations, but doesn’t cover geometrical aspects. IDS format can be used in combination with other standards, for example, to capture Exchange Information Requirements (ISO 19650), Level of Information Needs (EN 17412), or Product Data Templates (ISO23387).
Read more about the comparison in the blog post: “Methods to specify information requirements in digital construction projects”
The bSI webpage for IDS is here: Information Delivery Specification - buildingSMART International