Xbim.Essentials: a library for interoperable building information applications

Abstract

Licence Authors of JOSS papers retain copyright and release the work under a Creative Commons Attri-bution 4.0 International License (CC-BY). Summary The Xbim.Essentials library offers data extraction, data transformation and data validation functions for Building Information Models (BIM); its robust and optimised implementation allows efficient operations on gigabyte-range files for researchers and practitioners interested in the built environment. The library implements the complete object model of BuildingSMART's IFC schemas (2017) along with APIs for their management under the terms of the CDDL (Sun Mi-crosystems 2005), which makes it also suitable for commercial research and development projects. Relevant fields of research span from social sciences to construction engineering and applied mathematics on account of the breadth of domains covered in the over 800 classes of the schema across building lifecycles. The project implements public APIs for: • Federating, merging and splitting models and entities within models (non-trivial because of cyclic and bi-directional relationships defined in the schemas). • Verification of data quality through EXPRESS WHERE clauses and metadata constraints. • programmatic management of IFC properties and relations through Schema Meta-data. • Single point management of any IFC file, including XML, STEP21 and IFCZIP formats.