I see that IFC4Add2 offers computer interpretable listings, but although it is great, it doesn’t include any human descriptions for types or classes. Does this exist? If not, I suggest it be added, as it can be automatically parsed to produce documentation in vendors.
I do not understand the question. What you you mean with computer interpretable descriptions? Could you explain?
Sorry, I meant human descriptions, for instance on the computer interpretable page for Psets, it includes human descriptions e.g. the string “Date on which the overall condition is assessed”:
http://www.buildingsmart-tech.org/ifc/IFC4/Add2/html/psd/Pset_Condition.xml
Whereas the other computer interpretable listings here do not include any human descriptions:
http://www.buildingsmart-tech.org/ifc/IFC4/Add2/html/annex/annex-a.htm
yes, but what are you missing? The inclusion of the description of classes and properties as comments directly in the EXPRESS or XSD code?
We didn’t do it. But you can automatically fetch each description by:
…://www.buildingsmart-tech.org/ifc/“release”/“addendum”/htmml/link/“name of construct”.htm
e.g. http://www.buildingsmart-tech.org/ifc/IFC4/Add2/html/link/ifcactor.htm
I am missing the human descriptions. E.G. each IFC class’ attribute tables have a “Description” column. For that IfcActor example, the description column for the TheActor attribute is "Information about the actor. " - this information is not present in the EXPRESS or XSD or any computer interpretable listing. Similarly, there are no descriptions present for any enum definitions, such as in http://www.buildingsmart-tech.org/ifc/IFC4/Add2/html/link/ifcactor.htm - the enums are there in the XSD but do not have any human description.
I’d like to extract the human descriptions so that it can be used as information in an implementation to guide the user to enter in the right information.
I know it is possible to scrape HTML for the descriptions, but that is akin to scraping the UI, which is not a proper solution. That is why computer interpretable listings exist in the first place.
Can it be added to the EXPRESS / XSD for IFC4 and all future IFC releases?
If this isn’t resolved, I’d like to add this to the agenda for the ISG @jwouellette
It would be good if computers could extract human descriptions, so that they can be relayed on to users of the vendors.
Bump. Extracting these definitions would help in implementing UI descriptions to users in tools such as FreeCAD.
I had the same idea for IfcOWL too
It not only can help programmers know each entity and other types or classes inside the files, but also can used as a guidance inside the software (for instance as a hover) which guides user
However, for instance in IFC4 ADD2, there are 776 Entities, and over 2000 Types, Functions, Rules, Property Sets and Individual Properties
And IFC files come as pure/raw files, so it’s good have extra information inside the files
However, it seems that communities and software vendors have to do it themselves
P.S: What you’re looking for is here, inside the “IFCDOC”
I’d like to bump this issue - since it is preventing the automatic generation of tooltips and descriptions for end-users to easily navigate the IFC schema in an authoring application.
Another related issue that complicates the HTML parsing is that the HTML in the IFC specification seems to be invalid.
See for example this page:
view-source:https://standards.buildingsmart.org/IFC/DEV/IFC4_3/RC1/HTML/schema/ifcsharedbldgelements/lexical/ifcwall.htm
… where the W3C HTML validator reports about 15 errors before failing to process it further.
What is the process that buildingSMART uses to generate this documentation, and how easy is it to fix so that it can be validated and parsable without these types of errors?
Alternatively, if descriptions can be provided in a computer interpretable format, that would also be ideal.
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