De-Normalize IFC Model for Data Extraction

Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) has been widely adopted in Building Information Modeling (BIM) for information interchange. Actual data exchange relies heavily on the IFC support of target application. This paper introduces a generic way of accessing IFC model business data as needed. In this paper, we will present 1) a concept and a method to define tabular views of IFC data for downstream uses, 2) an algorithm to transform IFC data to defined tabular views, 3) a tool of exporting transformed results to ODBC compliant applications e.g. MS Office etc. in the context of i-model, a self-describing, read-only graphic container containing information with engineering precision, and 4) a case study to create COBie handover from IFC using this tool.