Episode Seventeen – Open Source Part 1

On Thursday, November 25th, 2021 Episode seventeen of the BILT Academy Podcast went live. Our seventeenth episode has been curated by our BILT Academy correspondent David. This month’s podcast is a BIM Technology podcast, and in it, David interviews industry expert Mark Wieringa

David has been reading a lot lately about data exchange and the limitations we experience in the building industry when using specific or multiple technologies that don’t correspond directly which leads to data exchange that is inaccurate. Learning more and more about IFC and BCF, I wanted to learn what is open source exactly and who is driving this? For that very reason, I invited Mark Wieringa of Bimforce in the Netherlands a fierce advocate of the open-source use in the AEC industry, for a chat.

Here is more information about this month’s interviewee: 

1. Mark Wieringa, Co-Founder and Information Specialist at BIMforce

Mark Wieringa is a trained building engineer & architect who worked at one of the leading architectural firms in the Netherlands as their BIM manager. Where he worked on very large projects managing data, developing the company and a national BIM standard, the Dutch Revit Standards. 
In 2015 he started Bimforce with Martijn de Riet out of the belief that BIM could be smarter and the AEC industry could use better solutions. Bimforce uses Open Source technology such as IFC at the core of all their software. They’ve developed a data driven parametric IFC content library called VerteX, a digital twin system called GRiDS and a residential building generator using their own IfcGraph model. 

Some resources from this month’s episode:

Blender – Blender’s mission is to bring the best 3D technology as tools in the hands of artists, for all platforms, everywhere in the world, free and open source forever.

BlenderBIM – An add-on for beautiful, detailed, and data-rich OpenBIM with Blender.

FreeCAD – Your own 3D parametric modeler

GitHub – Where open source communities live

OSArch – Creating a built environment with free software, increased transparency, and a more ethical approach 

buildingSMART: Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) – IFC is a standardized, digital description of the built asset industry.

buildingSMART: BIM Collaboration Format (BCF) – The BIM Collaboration Format (BCF) allows different BIM applications to communicate model-based issues with each other by leveraging IFC data that have been previously shared among project collaborators.

Episode Eighteen – Coming December 17th, 2021

We return on December 17th when we continue our deep dive into the topic of open source.

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