IFC

Catenda leverages the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) standard to provide a common data model to store BIM data. The IFC standard is maintained by buildingSMART International and is used to describe building and construction industry data. The IFC standard is an open standard and is not controlled by a single vendor or group of vendors.

A building and construction project will have contributors from different domains. Allowing each design team to manage its own BIM while also being able to view the project as a whole is core to the Catenda workflow. In Catenda, a project can consist of many models while allowing project contributors to interact only with the models relevant to them: access model data using the Catenda REST APIs or visualize models using the Catenda 2D and 3D Viewers.

Developers unfamiliar with the IFC standard will find it difficult interacting directly with the IFC data. The Catenda API provides a set of endpoints to interact with the IFC data in a more user-friendly way. Resources are provided in JSON format to facilitate digesting the data and expose how the IFC data is represented.

IFC support

Catenda supports the following IFC formats.

IFC processing

Uploaded IFC files are processed and made available on the Catenda platform. IFC files are often large and contain data that is computationally expensive to process, you are notified once processing has completed. Each entity in the IFC file is assigned a unique object id.