Proposal for a Modern Foundation for a Data-Driven Built Environment

Abstract: The Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) standard underpins BIM interoperability, but its STEP/EXPRESS stack is ill-suited to cloud-native, transactional workflows. Building on buildingSMART community-driven requirements and proposals, review of alternative solutions, and iterative prototyping, we propose the modernisation of IFC. The work includes a proposal for a data schema, JSON serialisation, and exchange mechanisms, while preserving IFC’s role as a semantically rich neutral data model. Innovation includes a compositional, layered federation model allowing incremental updates, multi-author collaboration, versioning, and fine-grained, traceable ownership. We compare the proposal to existing standard and discuss the potential, trade-offs and implications.