Announcing new research product - BIM-Masonry Project 3

Words: David Biggs
The Charles Pankow Foundation is pleased to announce that the following new Research Product is available for download at no cost at the CPF website (www.pankowfoundation.org). Please click under the Research Grants tab.

In this project the Georgia Tech team will depart to a degree from our previous approach of being platform neutral. Though we fully support the Open BIM approach and will develop neutral schemas (i.e., IFCs) for masonry wall information models in Phase III, we recognize that Autodesk Revit is the one of the primary BIM authoring tool in use in North America. Therefore, we feel that for maximum impact, we should focus on a single BIM authoring tool first, in order to lead others by example. However it is important to point out our commitment to make our work extensible to other BIM systems through the development of neutral specifications. Therefore, we feel that for maximum impact, we should focus on Revit, while also ensuring that our work is extensible to other BIM systems through the development of IFCs.

Visit http://www.pankowfoundation.org

The Charles Pankow Foundation wishes to acknowledge the contributions of David Biggs and the masonry industry support for the Building Information Modeling for Masonry Initiative (BIM-M).
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