What Exists Today, What's Missing, and Where We Sit¶

We BIM living the GAP between
DESIGN and our SPREADSHEET
The industry designs buildings. Who compiles them?

How to read this — the honest frame¶

This project is broad. To keep it honest, everything below is sorted into three tiers, and the line between them is never blurred:

Tier 1 — Landed. Works today, use-as-is-where-is, and every claim carries a witness (a §-logged, falsifiable test you can run). This is real commercial value now.
Tier 2 — Wedges. Small hardening or a short build away — the commercial on-ramps. Stated as targets, never as done.
Tier 3 — Frontier. The demonstrated promise — proven in architecture, not yet finished. Shown to be possible, labelled as unfinished.

If you grep the repo, the Tier-1 claims must hold and the Tier-2/3 ones must read as runway. That discipline is the point.

The core problem: geometry is not intent¶

Most BIM tools store geometry as the source of truth. An IFC file carries the building — 51,000+ elements of geometry, relationships, properties — in one monolithic file. Lose the IFC, lose the building. But a 200 MB IFC captures what was drawn, not what was meant. You cannot ask it "give me a building like this but with 4 m ceilings," because the intent was never separated from the output.

Autodesk solved it behind a proprietary wall. Revit's .rvt keeps full spatial fidelity internally, but is editable only in Revit with a shelf-life tied to Autodesk's support cycle [6]. Leave via IFC and "there's always loss of data... all constraints are lost and component parametrics are gone" [7].

The openBIM world has no equivalent. Bonsai/BlenderBIM is IFC-native [8], but IFC is an exchange format, not a compilation target — it does not decompose a building into a reusable BOM recipe, compile from it, and verify the round-trip [9].

The compilation challenge: extract a building's intent from its geometry, express it as a reusable recipe (BOM), recompile the recipe back into spatially correct geometry — and prove the recipe is faithful. Construction is industrialised manufacturing [11], yet architecture is drawn as art; the compiler gives determinism to art. A beam is either at (3200, 0, 2700) or it isn't — no probabilistic guessing [12].

That is what the BIM Intent Compiler does, in two databases — and it is the proven core that makes Tier 1 real.

The proven core (why the rest can be believed)¶

Input DB — an IFC (or OBJ/STL/DAE/GLB) is extracted into a normalised SQLite DB. Geometry hell is resolved here: origin divergence, unit mismatch (the 1000× metres-vs-mm error), axis ambiguity, and GUID identity — documented industry problems [1][2][3][4][5]. Every element becomes a row; every spatial relationship a foreign key. The building is SQL-queryable.
BOM abstraction — 51,000 elements decompose into ~700 BOM lines (73× compression) via formula verbs (TILE, ROUTE, FRAME, CLUSTER). This is the intent: not "12 wall meshes at these coordinates" but "12 of product W-EXT-200, tiled at 2.5 m along the north facade."
Output DB — the BOM + shared library recompiles into spatially placed geometry, each element carrying its original GUID. A 200 MB IFC becomes a ~10 KB semantic definition. The output is disposable — delete it, recompile, the geometry reproduces.
Rosetta Stone — Input vs Output across verification gates (counts, volumes, geometry hashes, spatial digests, GUID provenance, transforms, materials). 21 buildings from 9 authoring tools; 116/157 gates PASS, 4 ALL GREEN; worst-case positional error 0.002 mm. See SPATIAL_COMPILATION_PAPER.md.

The hard problem was always the spatial compilation. Everything downstream — 4D, 5D, cost, ERP — is a projection of the same verified BOM.

Tier 1 — Landed: use-as-is, where-is (witnessed today)¶

These work now, in a browser tab, no install. Each carries a witness you can run.

Currency note, 2026-09-27: three rows re-verified, one corrected, two more sourced facts folded in that bear on rows above without being their own row, everything else carried forward untouched. Verified merged and live: the ERP UX-parity row — bim-ootb PR #1613/#1626/#1636, read live off erp/ad_seed.db; the Viewer's clash + narrated fly-through row — PR #1697/#1699 merged, viewer/sw.js now v1449 on origin/main; and the 4D Time Machine row's editor claim — witness_gantt_edit_coherence had been silently judging a dead scheduling model, now fixed to judge the canonical one, with a live editor test confirming drag/clamp/cascade/persist off real §-logs (PR #1553, 7 PRs total, merged 2026-08-27). One caveat carried honestly: a fleet-wide construction-sequencing check still fails on 6 of 7 test buildings on floor-ordering grounds (§CPM_FLEET_VERDICT, re-verified 2026-09-15) — a schedule-data gap, not an editor defect. Corrected, not carried forward: W-MV-PARITY's prior 12/12 no longer holds. The Modeller now renders each building from its own per-resident _geo.db, while the witness still checks it against Duplex_extracted.db; the two disagree on triangle count for 82 of 203 shared geometry hashes. Parked, not fixed — full detail in Tier 3 below. Two more verified facts, not their own row: a photoreal-still defect that silently dropped whole element classes (glazing, furniture) from Alt+S bakes mid-playback, traced to a camera-culler/Time-Machine matrix-ownership conflict and fixed (PR

1660); and a 2026-09-04 audit that found three things believed live on bim-ootb's GitHub Pages —¶

a version stamp, JS minification, both ERP agent-download zips — were 404 despite green CI, caught only by fetching the live URL (§PAGES-SERVES-THE-BRANCH, PR #1680: the zips are fixed and re-verified by curl; the minification/version-stamp gap is a live repo-settings question, still unresolved). Not independently re-verified this pass, carried forward as before: the BIM↔ERP fold row, EVM, POS, iDempiere extraction, and the 5D cost row.

Capability	What it does	Witness
IFC handoff	Drop IFC/OBJ/STL/DAE/GLB/glTF/3DS/FBX → queryable DB → view, classify, export back to IFC. Geometry hell resolved at import.	Rosetta gates; `import.js` round-trip
4D Time Machine	Construction-sequence playback from BOM depth; stacked S-curve folded from real orders (Σ == PlannedAmt). The Gantt editor's own edit path (drag/resize/lock/undo a bar) is now witnessed end to end, not just the playback. Click any element in the 3D view to see its scheduled task, dates and derived cost — closing a slice of the Navisworks TimeLiner/Synchro object-to-schedule gap.	`W-SHOP-SCURVE`; `witness_gantt_edit_coherence`, `witness_gantt_lock_integrity`; `W-S7-CANVAS-PICK` 14/14
5D cost (editable)	BOQ + cost rollup with editable per-jurisdiction rate templates; Variation Order Excel (FIDIC Clause 12).	`4D5DAnalysis.md`; VO demo [10]
BIM↔ERP — to the cent	A BIM-pushed building folds into a real procurement/project order and ERP documents, reproducing iDempiere/Odoo output at `maxDiff=0c`. No other tool connects BIM to ERP over one signed log.	`W-PROJ-FOLD`, `W-GW-HOSP-FOLD`, `W-FOLD-COMPLETE`
ERP screens — AD-driven, not a hand-list	The five core document screens (Sales Order, Shipment, Invoice, Payment, Allocation Line) now render iDempiere's own AD field set per window instead of a curated shortlist — `c_order` 8→56 fields, `c_payment` 4→78, 139 DisplayLogic-bearing fields now evaluated live off the same AD metadata iDempiere reads, plus live AD_Ref_List/Yes-No editors and AD_Val_Rule-filtered FK pickers.	`W-PARITY-FIELDSET`, `W-PARITY-REFLIST`, `W-PARITY-VALRULE`, `W-AD-DISPLAYLOGIC-LIVE`
MEP clash + narrated fly-through	A camera-directed tour of the building (Cinema Path Editor) surfaces real, triangle-exact clashes (not bounding-box proxies) as persistent world markers, reveals disciplines one at a time (finest-detail discipline first, MEP always last) as it passes, and overlays live measurements (spans, clear heights, room areas) — an automated clash-and-measure narration, not a static report.	`witness_clash_mesh_narrowphase`, `witness_clash_film_labels`/`_markers`, `witness_datum_stability`, `witness_indoor_beats`, `witness_linear_beat`, `witness_storey_walkable_card`
Photoreal still render (Alt+S)	A physically-lit single-frame render from any camera pose, in the same browser tab — light comes only from the building's own modelled fixtures and openings (fabricated staging lights were found and removed outright), with zone-based daylight visibility and shadow cascades. Under active accuracy tuning, stated plainly: a light-intensity-scale audit run the same day this note was written found part of the scale unsourced, and an exterior-wall darkening defect is being fixed on an unmerged branch.	`witness_sky_view_field`, `witness_zone_glare`, `witness_still_shadow_fit`, `viewer/tests/smoke_alts.js`
Budget vs Actual (EVM)	Planned vs Committed at project + phase + task grain; CV/SV/CPI/SPI in BigDecimal; cost overrun surfaced on the 4D S-curve.	`W-GW-HOSP-COSTVAR`; `proj_control.js`
What-If (cost)	Speculative VO branch — revised = original + approved + pending — kept separate from the official ledger, reversible.	`W-FIN-BLUE-SPEC` (5/5)
Dashboard / analytics	Generic multi-view over any data model: donut grid, "By-X" group-by chips that fill the grid, pivot lens, scrubbable timeline filmstrip, CSV/SVG/PNG export. Field-driven, not hardcoded per table.	`W-DASHBOARD`; `pivot_lens.html`
POS sale loop	Ring → complete → backflush BOM → hold/recall → deliver-later → register, all over the signed op-log; the signed orderline doubles as the buyer's receipt artifact. WAN bench to 10,000 stations with idempotent retry + email-backup recovery.	`W-POS`; `poc_pos_wan_scale.js` (B1–B7)
iDempiere DB extraction	Connect a live iDempiere PostgreSQL → raw, non-inventive PG→SQLite extraction (`--list-clients`, `--masters`).	`migrate_agent.js`; `ERP_RAW_MIGRATION.md`

The standout no one else has: building → procurement order, in one browser, tied to the cent. The Dashboard is the answer to "where's your Odoo kanban / SAP analytics" — and because it's AD-field-driven, it's one dashboard for every data model, not a bespoke screen per report.

Tier 2 — Wedges: small hardening, the commercial on-ramps¶

Real markets, short runway. Stated as targets — not yet shipped.

POS → Malaysian e-invoicing + personal accounting (the long tail). The LHDN/MyInvois mandate forces every business onto e-invoicing, and the government's own central service has buckled under server-side load — a structural opening for a serverless, local-first POS that each merchant runs themselves. The sale loop is landed; the wedge is hardening it against real-world bugs and adding the compliance surface. The signed orderline is already a receipt artifact — evolving it into a MyInvois-format submission is the build. (Not yet in code; this is the target.)
Touch-kitchen + self-order tabs + QR payment. A self-order surface (URL-fetched remote ordering, QR payment display, payment-status fold returned by email) sits naturally on the same op-log. (Not yet in code; the POS loop it rides is.)
iDempiere DB health-check report — "the diagnosis; the diet is optional." A read-only analysis pass over the already-working extraction: scan a user's DB for dirty data, orphans, GL imbalances, and a migration-gap score. Sold as a health check + migration plan — standalone value even if they never migrate. Low lift (the extraction plumbing exists), high value (migration paralysis is real). (Analysis pass not yet built; extraction is.)
What-If (schedule ripple). Finish-to-start cascade on the timeline. Engine done; browser drive pending.

Tier 3 — Frontier: the demonstrated promise (the dragon's head)¶

DAGeVu modeller — a browser-native BIM authoring tool whose endgame is to sever the Revit-license tether. The hard part is shipped and witnessed: an occt-wasm B-rep kernel as a pure ops → mesh fold, the signed op-log as the feature tree (scrub, undo, tamper- evident), and IFC4 export that round-trips (IfcWall + profile + IfcOpeningElement, re-imports exact). A user can today author a few walls, a door, an opening, and MEP runs, and export usable IFC — without Revit.

Update 2026-09-27 — the working thesis changed (generate, then edit minimally), real generation now lands end-to-end, a real defect was found by finally auditing the witnesses themselves, and one claim in this section needs correcting.

Since 2026-09-24 the strategy is no longer "hand-author a wall at a time." It is generate, then edit minimally: open an ARC-only (architecture-only) building, let walkers generate the structure and MEP from measured rules, correct the result with a few signed edits — Open → Walk → Route → Sign → Review → Edit → Re-walk/re-route → Save/Export. Merged and measured on real buildings (bim-ootb #1762/#1768 plus the PRs below): routing now reaches the production walk path (it was silently dead on 7 of 8 sample buildings) and a generated network can be signed — Terminal's plumbing runs went 0 → 2,915 signed sweeps; a walk is one undo-able gesture (Ctrl+Z removes the whole generated layer, Ctrl+Y restores it); moving a fixture re-routes its pipes. One measured "Walk ALL Services" pass, generated / flagged-for-review per building: SampleHouse 60/0, Duplex 206/29, SampleCastle 514/9, HHS 3,415/0, Clinic 5,140/0, Hospital 39,979/22, HospitalGarage 13,965/0, Terminal 7,854/60 — read as "little is left to fix," not as an "N× faster" claim, since there is still no hand-modelling baseline to compare against.

That same push found a 3-month-old defect no witness had caught: the product catalog was silently loading 0 products (a path typo after a June refactor), so every bend fitting failed to render while every witness stayed green (fixed, bim-ootb #1770). That is the direct reason a systematic audit of the Modeller's own witness suite was run next — and it is still open: 19 of 58 browser witnesses came back red on main, nothing in CI catches this today. Four real product bugs (not test bugs) were found and fixed this way: the Outliner's adjacency lens was dead on every ARC-seeded pick, eye-toggles never repainted after opening a building, x-ray silently reverted to opaque after any re-fold, and a route-walk's tag was dropped at commit (so x-ray treated its pipes as structure). Separately, 6 of 8 sample buildings were opening with zero rooms, because the Modeller never called the room walker the Viewer already runs — fixed, W-MODELLER-ROOM-INJECT 25/0. All of this lives on bim-ootb branch test/modeller-net-audit, pushed, no PR yet — found, fixed, and witnessed, but not merged and not live.

Kernel breadth — 6 more occt shoulders wired in one session (GEOM_REVOLVE/SHELL/ OFFSET/FILLET_VARIABLE/CHAMFER_DIST_ANGLE/DRAFT, W-BONSAI-TIER1 20/20), plus GEOM_ARRAY/GEOM_LOFT (formula-driven instancing, real curve-following). GEOM_REVOLVE is the first axisymmetric-solid authoring path this tool has ever had.
MEP domain fidelity, the harder half — fitting rotation and pipe/duct cross-section are now EXTRACTED from real IFC/catalog data (RosettaStone mini-BOM method), not computed — a same-day audit found and fixed a bisector-computed rotation that was ~135° wrong on real data, and an invented pipe diameter that was 2.3× oversized and the wrong shape. A shared resolveRealPlacement() gate now HARD-FAILS rather than silently substituting invented geometry anywhere in the leaf-placement path — a structural fix, not a point patch. Full detail: docs/internal/WalkerDoctrine.md §7-§10.
Cross-app trust — correcting the prior claim, not carrying it forward. W-MV-PARITY (Modeller ≡ Viewer on the same real building) is no longer 12/12. The Modeller now renders each building from its own per-resident _geo.db, while the witness still checks it against Duplex_extracted.db — the two geometry sources disagree on triangle count for 82 of 203 shared geometry hashes (121 agree, 12 missing). Parked, not fixed, pending a call on which geometry source is canonical (test/modeller-net-audit, 2026-09-27). Stated plainly because the Tier-1 currency note above previously cited this witness's old 12/12 result as current.
Dimension-driven parametric edit — first real increment, not yet the whole gap. p2p_distance (width) is wired and PROVEN by exact numeric position assertion (not a screenshot) — real Playwright interaction, hand-computed expected geometry, witness_e2e_sketch_dims.js 10/10. Only ~5 of ~60 real planegcs constraints are wired; this is genuinely the gap between "constraint-solving on fixed hand-drawn geometry" and Grasshopper/Dynamo-class "geometry as a function of parameters" — most of it still open.

Honest distance to the mountain top: ~40-45%, carried forward from the 2026-07-25 estimate — no source read this pass gives a revised figure, so the number is not re-rounded. What moved since then is breadth of what generates automatically (the loop above) and the discovery of how much of the existing witness net was not actually checking what it claimed to; neither is the same axis as "kernel/constraint completeness," so it does not by itself move this %. The still-open gap remains constraint-solving depth and the direct-manipulation UI, per prompts/BONSAI_KERNEL_RESEARCH.md §GAP-TO-COMPETITIVE. Read: weeks-to-months, not years, unchanged.

Witnesses: W-BONSAI-* (bonsai_signed_live.js, bonsai_ifc_live.js, bonsai_sweep_live.js, bonsai_fillet_live.js, bonsai_move_live.js, bonsai_tier1_live.js), W-MV-PARITY (witness_e2e_mv_parity.js), W-BONSAI-ROSETTASTONE/witness_mep_rosettastone_lookup.js. See ModellerKernelFold.md and docs/internal/WalkerDoctrine.md.

Occupant/topology graph — one substrate, three consumers (update 2026-07-25). A second frontier piece sits underneath the editing kernel: a typed graph over the same building where every edge is recovered (from IFC relations) or derived (pure geometry — face-touch, cadence, bbox- span), never invented, oracle'd to a 0.000mm fold round-trip and proven construct-agnostic — the same builders run unmodified on a house and on a bridge (no grid, no storeys, zero fabricated edges either way). Three separate features consume the same graph rather than each growing its own pathfinding: the Spatial Dependency Graph's edit-time fold/cascade engine, an occupant-navigation graph (room ↔ corridor ↔ stair ↔ exit — a real hospital's room pathability raised 56%→86%, an isolated 315 m² atrium reconnected), and the Viewer's Fly Tour, which routes its camera through the identical compiled vocabulary instead of inventing its own waypoints (highlight-first routing shipped, PR #989).

What keeps this in Frontier rather than the Moats list below: a provenance gate now checks every deploy of this data on two axes — the exact bytes of the building DB actually being served, and the exact commit of the code that measured it — refusing to run against a stale checkout or a mismatched snapshot. It replaced a manual discipline that had already let two real defects reach near-publication (a raster built for one room count silently judged against another; a stale engine checkout nearly reported a fix as a regression), and its own first run caught a third: an uploaded patch with no reconstructable source in the repository. Stated plainly, what's still open: on 5 of a real building's 7 storeys, the occupant graph's walkability today is a room/corridor-rectangle network, not independently measured floor geometry — real connectivity under that definition, not yet demonstrated against slab-level geometry there. No incumbent or open-source BIM tool surveyed below treats occupant navigation, camera-tour routing, and parametric editing as three consumers of one zero-invented, snapshot-verified graph; this is architecture proven on a real multi-storey building, not yet a finished capability. See prompts/SPATIAL_DEPENDENCY_GRAPH.md, prompts/Modeller/DISC_Walker/OCCUPANT_PATHFINDER.md, prompts/Viewer/FLY_TOUR_CORRIDOR_GRAPH.md.

The landscape — nobody else compiles, nobody else connects¶

Tier 1 — Incumbents (geometry authoring)¶

Tool	Role
Autodesk Revit	Full BIM authoring. Industry standard.
ArchiCAD (Graphisoft)	Architectural BIM. Strong in EU/Asia.
Tekla Structures (Trimble)	Steel/concrete detailing, fabrication-grade.

They create IFC. They model geometry. They do not decompose it into a BOM recipe, compile from intent, or verify the round-trip.

Tier 2 — Visual newcomers¶

Tool	What it does
Snaptrude	Browser sketch-to-BIM
TestFit	AI generative site planning
Arkio	VR/AR collaborative design

Design exploration. No BOM, no compilation, no verification.

Tier 3 — Open source (IFC-native)¶

Tool	What it does
Bonsai/BlenderBIM	IFC-native authoring inside Blender
IfcOpenShell	IFC parsing/generation library
ThatOpen (IFC.js)	Web IFC viewer/editor

They parse and display IFC. They do not abstract intent, compile from recipes, or prove round-trip fidelity — and none connect BIM to a transaction ERP over one signed log.

Adjacent layers — interop and governance (not authoring, not competing directly)¶

Layer	Example	What it does	What it doesn't
Geometry interop	Speckle	Git-like versioning for geometry across tools	Needs a server; stops at geometry — no cost/schedule/ERP
Governance/CDE	AWARO, Trimble Connect, ACC	WIP→Shared→Published workflow, roles, sign-off	Manages artifacts, not derived data — computes nothing

Neither is a competitor — both could sit upstream or downstream of this pipeline. The versioning half (Speckle's job) is already native here as the signed op-log (Moat #6, no server needed); the governance half (AWARO's job) is a state machine that could ride on top of this pipeline's merge gate rather than replace it.

Moats¶

Spatial compilation is solved — and hard to replicate. Intent extraction, recompile, and a 0.002 mm round-trip across 21 buildings from 9 tools. Years of domain work.
BIM↔ERP over one signed op-log — unique. Building → procurement order, ERP documents reproduced to the cent. Requires rare BIM and manufacturing-ERP knowledge in one head.
One generic dashboard for every data model. AD-field-driven group-by/pivot/timeline — not a bespoke report per table.
Serverless / local-first by construction. Each browser is its own server; the only shared resource is a stateless signature gatekeeper. Scales to 10,000 POS stations with no central database to overload — the exact failure mode that sank the national e-invoicing rollout.
Domain-agnostic pipeline. Houses, terminals, bridges, rail (93% BOM compression) — one pipeline, a YAML mapping per domain. See INFRA_DESIGNER_SRS.md.
Op-log = git-for-data. Every state is a deterministic, reversible fold of a signed log — what makes What-If branches, audit, and crash-replay fall out for free.

The asymmetry: adding a GUI to a compilation foundation takes weeks. Adding spatial compilation — or a to-the-cent ERP fold — to a GUI-first tool takes years.

Honest risks (kept current, not just moats)¶

Adoption is structurally harder for an intersection than a point solution. Needs a modeler, a scheduler, and a cost/ERP owner to all find it worthwhile at once.
Generality is claimed, not yet proven externally. Every capability measured so far was built and tuned in-house; a genuinely foreign file is still an open test.
Distribution is currently bespoke, not repeatable. Real signal so far has cost real founder-hours per contact — not yet a growth motion.
Credibility currently rests on one person across communities that don't normally talk to each other (BIM, ERP, open-source/local-first) — coherent, but earned per conversation, not yet institutional.

None of these block using or trying the project — they're the risks worth tracking as it scales, stated plainly rather than smoothed over.

Who uses this, and what they'd pay for¶

Role	Workflow	Value	Tier
Quantity Surveyor	Drop IFC → BOQ + Variation Order Excel	Automated takeoff, no Navisworks	1
Contractor (tender)	Import architect's IFC → classify → costed BOM	Quantities tied to verified geometry	1
Project Manager	Push building → ERP project; track Planned vs Committed + EVM	Budget/actual + cost What-If in one place	1
Developer / Investor	Share a URL → browse the model, no install	Instant stakeholder view	1
SME merchant (Malaysia)	Run a local POS that does e-invoicing + accounting	Mandate compliance without a server to crash	2 (target)
ERP owner (migration)	Run a DB health-check → dirty-data + migration-gap report	Knows what they're sitting on before committing	2 (target)
Architect / small practice	Author basic geometry in-browser, export IFC	A path off per-seat license fees	3 (frontier)

Get involved¶

The project is open source (MIT) and actively developed. Roadmap: ACTION_ROADMAP.md. For the journey from the IfcOpenShell Federation branch (Oct 2025) to today, see PROJECT_CHRONOLOGY.md.

If you work with IFC models, run an ERP you're afraid to migrate, or just want verified spatial compilation — try it, break it, tell us what's missing. Contributions welcome: product catalogs, jurisdiction rules, format importers, test buildings.

Cross-references: SPATIAL_COMPILATION_PAPER.md — academic paper (0.002 mm proof), MigrateComparisonPaper.md — ERP fold, to the cent, BOMBasedCompilation.md — compilation pipeline spec, DATA_MODEL.md — 4-database schema, TestArchitecture.md — Rosetta Stone gates and traceability, ModellerKernelFold.md — modeller as signed-log fold, PROJECT_CHRONOLOGY.md — dated history + commit ledger, ACTION_ROADMAP.md — project roadmap

References¶

[1] Muller, M.F. et al. "On BIM Interoperability via the IFC Standard: An Assessment from the Structural Engineering and Design Viewpoint." Applied Sciences 11(23), 2021. — Documents geometry loss and property loss across IFC exchanges between Revit, ArchiCAD, Tekla, and others. doi:10.3390/app112311430

[2] Pazlar, T. & Turk, Z. "Interoperability in practice: Geometric data exchange using the IFC standard." ITcon 13, 2008. — Early benchmark showing "distortion or loss of information related to the geometry of the elements" and "incorrect connection between elements" across five IFC-certified tools. ResearchGate

[3] Diakite, A. & Zlatanova, S. "About the Geo-referencing of BIM models." TU Delft, 2018. — Analysis of coordinate system divergence in IFC georeferencing, origin offset problems, and IfcMapConversion limitations. PDF

[4] BIMcollab. "Coordinating IFC Models with World Coordinate System information." — Documents how models without IfcMapConversion "will be shown somewhere far away from the already loaded model." BIMcollab Help

[5] Autodesk. "Revit 2024: Enhancements to IFC Geometric Fidelity." 2023. — Autodesk's own acknowledgement that IFC geometric fidelity required improvement, with fixes for "complex families (parametric railings, helical stairs) which may generate fragmented geometries." Autodesk Blog

[6] CAD Interop. "Revit File Formats: BIM Interoperability, IFC Conversion." — Notes that .rvt files are "editable only in Revit" with "a shelf-life of 3 years (the lifespan of Autodesk support)." CAD Interop

[7] Moult, D. "How to create better IFC files with Revit." thinkmoult.com. — Documents that "even when you manage to export your geometry through IFC, there's always loss of data" and "importing that into Revit makes it utterly useless." thinkmoult

[8] Bonsai BIM. "Beautiful, detailed, and data-rich OpenBIM." — Bonsai is IFC-native: "you're not creating geometry that gets converted to IFC later. You're working directly in IFC." bonsaibim.org

[9] OSArch Community. "How to import IFC with large coordinates?" — Documents floating-point precision limits with georeferenced files requiring local origin offsets, and that "horizontal construction where distances frequently exceed 1km presents challenges." OSArch

[10] Oon, R.D. "BIM OOTB — Browser Variation Order from IFC Import." 2026. — Demonstrates what becomes possible when BIM data lives in a queryable DB rather than a file: geometry stored as hash-keyed BLOBs (identical meshes instanced, not duplicated), revision diff as SQL EXCEPT on GUID sets, cost impact as GROUP BY on diff × rates template. IFC import, 4D/5D variance, and costed Variation Order Excel — entirely in the browser, no server. YouTube

[11] Autodesk. "Industrialized Construction." — "Applies the discipline and systematized fabrication process of manufacturing to the design and build process... as consistent and replicable as widgets rolling off a factory assembly line." Autodesk Emerging Tech

[12] Olanrewaju, O.I. et al. "Quantifying the influence of BIM adoption." Automation in Construction 161, 2024. — Notes "a significant gap between research and industry practice" and that the industry "still lacks its own quantification methodology for BIM benefits." ScienceDirect