IFCWebServer.org is a data model server and online viewer for Building Information Models (BIM) based on IFC standards. It aims to simplify sharing and exchanging of information from BIM models using open and standard formats like (IFC, HTML, XML, CSV, JSON) and check the quality of BIM models (Level of Details, Level of Development). BIM managers and designers can query, filter and make reports about any information inside IFC models easily.
BIMViewer: view and share BIM models online through any modern internet browser.
The project consists mainly of two parts: (1) the data model server IFCWebServer and (2) the online viewer BIMViewer. Despite of having accessing the information in BIM models as the main interest (through queries, filters, reports), the 3D visualization offered by BIMViewer provide an handy way to view and share BIM models and visualize the results of data queries online.
IFCWebServer supports natively any IFC official release starting with IFC2X_Final issued on 2001 to the latest release IFC4 issued on 2013. Moreover, it supports any valid IFC sub schema or extended schema so it can be used by IFC researchers and developer .
The Server has an open structure and can be extended easily through adding new extensions ( class methods or modules written in Ruby) to add extra functionality. The extensions can be as simple as one line to calculate the area of a circle profile, or very sophisticated like a plug-in to export the data inside the IFC-models into other formats like COBie spreadsheets or to extract 2D plans automatically from 3D models.
The vision has grew up with time to move the IFCWebServer from the level of enabling data exchange to be an integrated web-based BIM data model server (iBIM) offering advanced features like: users management, BIM data manipulation, rules engine for automatic data checking, integration with COBie, integration with 3D engine on the server side and interactive online viewer, full-text search and automatic translation functions.