National BIM Library - progress report

The first release of the National BIM Library content set is progressing well. A draft set of content has now been put together and has been sent out for comment to a small set of collaborators. Next week, we will make this available for comment to those in our the National BIM Library linkedin.com group.

I include some screenshots below to show some progress. Our target date for publication is end of November 2011.

Internal Partitions
The screenshot below shows an IFC 2x3 file with a number of commonly pre-configured internal partitions. The materials within the partition may be seen to the left.

External Walls
A number of pre-configured external wall types are also included in the draft content. The screenshot below shows some of these.

Internal doors
In addition to the BIM objects, documentation will provided detailing the parameters and the behaviour associated with these.

External doors
A key driving factor behind the National BIM Library is interoperability. All content will be released in native CAD vendor format and IFC2x3. The example below is a demo building file viewed in the free Solibri Model Viewer. The panel to the bottom left shows the COBie2 parameters coming through in an example project.

Once this set of content is released then other objects such as windows, furniture, roofs, floors, sanitary ware will be developed. The content is being authored in Revit format, but then converted into IFC2x3 as a base data format. We hope that for launch we will include native content in another of other CAD formats too.

All content will be freely available to download, it will be written primarily for use in the UK market (see references to BS 8300 in screenshots above) and will be used as a starting point for those adopting BIM.