Graphisoft hosts buildingSMART event in Budapest

Graphisoft hosted the latest General Assembly of Implementers meeting on 5-6 February 2025, at Graphisoft Park in Budapest.

Daniel Csillag, CEO, Graphisoft opened the two-day event, which brought together industry experts, technology innovators and openBIM implementers worldwide to discuss the future of buildingSMART’s standards and solutions.

General Assembly of Implementers

With 40+ active participants from 19 countries, the meeting focused on the future development of IFC 5.

IFC5 is the next generation of the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) standard, aimed at simplifying and improving data exchange in the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) sector.

After a morning of updates and discussions around buildingSMART’s standards and solutions, the attendees split into several sub-groups for an IFC 5 hackathon.

Focus areas for the groups included workflows, properties, materials, alignment and georeferencing.

Key outcomes of the hackathon included:

• Agreement on principles and scope of IFC 5
• First demonstrations of IFC 5 data shared between multiple software tools
• A roadmap for the next six months of development

“A big step forward”

Holger Kreienbrink, Director of Product Intelligence and Partnerships, Graphisoft commented: “It was a pleasure to host the gathering of so many passionate people from the world’s top AEC/O software developers.

“These meetings show that by working through buildingSMART, even competitors can move forward together on the shared goal of interoperability.”

Kreienbrink concluded: “IFC 5 will be a big step forward and opens new possibilities.”

“Rebirth of IFC”

Léon van Berlo, Technical Director at buildingSMART International stated: “The principle of IFC 5 is that multiple users contribute pieces of data to the overall dataset.

“It was wonderful to see everyone contributing to parts of the overall IFC 5 definition in a place that has so much history for IFC.

“Working on the ‘rebirth of IFC’ in the same location that contributed so much to the original principles was very special,” he continued.