Štefan Jaud was the Technical Lead for the first BIM Fit Check, held on May 8, 2025 at the 22nd buildingSMART-Anwendertag in Essen. That role starts long before the event: deciding what "correct" actually looks like for georeferencing in IFC, writing the evaluation criteria, and building the test models to showcase the different (even edge) cases that are supported by the specification.
Photos: buildingSMART Deutschland e. V.
The Use Case: Georeferencing in IFC 4.3
If an engineering firm designs a bridge in ETRS89/UTM32 (EPSG:25832 horizontal) and DHHN2016 (EPSG:7837 vertical) and hands over an IFC file, does the receiving software know where that bridge actually is? The exporting software needs to encode the coordinate reference system correctly using IfcProjectedCRS and IfcRigidOperation — a combination introduced in IFC 4.3 that many tools do not yet support or handle inconsistently. The importing software needs to read it, save it and interpret it.
All six passed
Six companies tested their software for correct coordinate reference system handling in IFC 4.3. The participants received a digital badge, commemorating their success.
| Company | Software |
|---|---|
| AKG Software Consulting GmbH | VESTRA INFRAVISION |
| albert.ing GmbH | squirrel |
| IB&T Software GmbH | card_1 |
| ProVI GmbH | ProVI |
| QLX GmbH | smarttrass |
| thinkproject GmbH | VDC Manager |
Jury: Andreas Geiger (KIT), Christoph Kautter (DB InfraGO AG), Prof. Dr.-Ing. Christian Clemen (HTW Dresden)