ISO 12006-2 and IFC - Prerequisites for Coordination of Standards for Classification and Interoperability

There are two major candidates for Core Ontologies for the construction and facilities management sector, the ISO 12006-2 Framework for classification of information, and the Industry Foundation Classes, IFC. ISO 12006-2 has been developed to harmonize different national and regional classification systems. It is applied world wide in the development of classification systems for everyday use in the construction industry. The IFCs are intended to enable effective infor¬mation sharing within the AEC/FM industry, but are still mainly at a prototype stage of development. The stan¬dards have similar objectives but show fundamental differences in semantics and structure. This work compares the standards and points out similarities and differences, firstly in order to understand their structure, and secondly to initiate a discussion about the need and the possibility to co-ordinate them. An integration of IFC with ISO 12006-2 would facilitate and speed up the application in everyday practise of object-based information management. According to the documentation, the starting point of IFC was to reject classification, and therefore integration with ISO 12006-2 would require a major shift of approach. Development of a common meta model, a generic domain model, and a coordinated domain framework are con-sidered necessary tasks.