Štefan Jaud and Dr.-Ing. Rico Steyer (AKG Software Consulting GmbH) presented "Open BIM Data Formats for Infrastructure: the German Developer's Perspective" at infraBIM Open 2026, held June 8–10 at ESTP Paris. The central questions: does the buildingSMART process actually make room for the companies that have to implement the standards? Are open BIM standards for infrastructure built with software developers in mind?
Cover Image Credit: InfraBIM Open
Open BIM for infrastructure needs two things to work: someone who knows what information is required, and someone who knows how to encode it. The vocabulary layer (bSDD, OKSTRA), the requirements layer (IDM), and the data schema (IFC, BCF) each sit at that boundary.
buildingSMART International (bSI), national organizations, and industry players have built up a substantial body of standards and tools for open BIM in infrastructure: IFC, IDS, BCF, IDM, MVD, and more. But it doesn't say much about what implementing those standards in software actually looks like. The schema dependencies, edge cases, and backward compatibility questions a developer faces when adding IFC export to a product are different from the ones a user faces when running a model check.
Image Credit: buildingSMART International
Planning describes what information needs to be delivered and when. Implementation describes how software actually produces and consumes it. The presentation's argument is that those two things drift apart during standards development.
Image Credit: based upon Jaud et al. (2024)
