
Most such models are made available as point clouds or BIM (e.g., IFC), the former being generally provided as unstructured information while the latter comes highly structured and rich in semantic information. The interest in 3D indoor models has been continuously growing. In particular, it is noticeable that the overall quality of the models requires specific additional care by the modellers before relying on them for automatic analysis, and a high level of variability is present concerning the storage of some relevant information (such as georeferencing). The aim is to find common patterns in data set from practice and their possible discrepancies with the standard, in order to find ways to address such discrepancies in a next step. In this study, a sample of models produced by practitioners for aims different from their explicit use within automatic processing tools is inspected and analyzed. However, when trying to use IFC models from practice for automatic analysis, some issues emerge, as a consequence of a misalignment between what is prescribed by, or available in, the standard with the data sets that are produced in practice. Big efforts are being made by the standardization organization buildingSMART, to develop and maintain this standard in collaboration with researchers, companies and institutions. Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) is a complete, wide and complex open standard data model to represent Building Information Models. A companion article (Part II) describes the results of the benchmark related to CityGML, the counterpart of IFC within geoinformation.

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Interestingly, different IFC software programs with the same standardized data sets yield inconsistent results, with few detectable common patterns, and significant issues are found in their support of the standard, probably due to the very high complexity of the standard data model.

The GeoBIM benchmark project is aimed at finding such evidence by involving external volunteers, reporting on various aspects of the behavior of tools (geometry, semantics, georeferencing, functionalities), analyzed and described in this article. Nevertheless, a systematic investigation of these issues has never been carried out, and there is thus insufficient evidence for tackling the problems. Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), the buildingSMART open standard for BIM, is underused with respect to its promising potential, since, according to the experience of practitioners and researchers working with BIM, issues in the standard’s implementation and use prevent its effective use.
