Hello everyone
My client has asked to get the COBie Excel (all information) from IFC4. I need to know which properties have to be completed during modelling. Is there any clear information about this?
Thank you in advanced,
Pilar
@pilarjimenez the official COBie 4.2 is in part 4.2 of the NBIMS document here. In particular, see page 46 onwards which explains the IFC4 mapping.
However, I wouldn’t call it “clear”. It is written in human terms, not explicit code, so sometimes you will find ambiguity. You will also find that the spreadsheet representation of COBie (as opposed to the IFC MVD representation) is not a one-to-one mapping to IFC data. It is a many to one relationship. You can convert IFC to spreadsheet, but not the reverse. There is data loss.
I would also warn you that after reviewing this, you will find that many tools that claim to deliver COBie are actually doing it incorrectly.
Due to these faults in the design of the COBie mapping (i.e. the ambiguity), I have developed a COBie IFC to spreadsheet converter. It will also output a log of errors it discovers in your IFC. It is part of IfcOpenShell and is 100% free and open source software. It is also fairly easy to read, so you can see for yourself exactly how IFC gets translated into the spreadsheet.
Bill East has also got his own converter, but it isn’t quite so straightforward to use, as it requires quite a bit of prerequisite knowledge to run stand-alone, or somebody else to setup it in a BIMServer instance for you if you don’t know how.
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Thank you Muda! Very usefull your comments. I’ve visited your link to your tool but i suppose it is not avaible yet. I only see code (i’m just an arquitect) but not an .exe or similar. Please, confirm me if i can test it.
Thank you again
@pilarjimenez you can download the free IFCCOBie tool from the BlenderBIM Add-on website.
Name your IFC file input.ifc and place it in the same folder as the tool, and run the exe. Please let me know if there are any issues!