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by swiss_knight on 25 Jan 2025, edited 20 Feb 2025
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+1 votes
Hi,
when googling "IFC 4.3.2 specification" the very first links that we can click are some pointing to the version "under development" such as this one: https://ifc43-docs.standards.buildingsmart.org/
and to my knowledge, there is no link to the official 4.3.2 schema specification. To me, this is an referencing issue in itself.
In order to get to the current 4.3.2 schema specification I have bookmarked this page: https://technical.buildingsmart.org/standards/ifc/ifc-schema-specifications/ which helps a lot, but here, I cannot find a link to the 4.3.2 development version.
But my main concern here is the following:
In the development link, there is a very practical "Search" field:
whereas in the official link there is unfortunately no such "Search" field:
Does anybody know why?
Thanks,
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by steverugi on 25 Jan 2025
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I ususally go to IFC4_3/HTML
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by Moult on 26 Jan 2025
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+5 votes
The official version is submitted to ISO. ISO has requirements for how a document must be formatted, and one of those requirements is that it isn't dynamic - hence no search feature.
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by swiss_knight on 20 Feb 2025
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Hmm, thank your for this clarification. So if I understand correctly and if I can read between the lines, that would mean that the current IFC 4.3.2 website actually serves as a standard “in itself”?
Isn't that a bit strange? Indeed, the world of the Web is designed to be dynamic and interactive, whereas a standard is, at least in my mind, designed to be static and above all designed to last over time. So the PDF/A format would be more appropriate for publishing a standard rather than a web site which relies on plenty of different technologies and which will, for sure, one day, having compatibility or display issues.
Finally, with that in mind, I would rephrase my question as: does a dynamic web site (i.e. including the search bar) exist for the official IFC 4.3.2 schema (i.e. not the version under current development) so that people can search for what they want easily and in a user-friendly way? In other words, a dynamic clone of the “published” ISO-compliant static website.
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by Rick_Brice on 20 Feb 2025
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+3 votes
https://ifc43-docs.standards.buildingsmart.org/
The version with the search bar is the same as the ISO version without the search bar but with additional examples and clarifications in the documentation.
Example
https://standards.buildingsmart.org/IFC/RELEASE/IFC4_3/HTML/lexical/IfcClothoid.htm
https://ifc43-docs.standards.buildingsmart.org/IFC/RELEASE/IFC4x3/HTML/lexical/IfcClothoid.htm
Notice that the "with search bar" version has elaborated on the IfcClothoid documentation.