What this assessment is, and what it is not.

This is only a technical readiness assessment. It measures organisational readiness for open-standard working, and the data quality of a model file supplied by the respondent. That is its entire scope.

It says nothing about the lawfulness, safety, structural adequacy, buildability, fitness for purpose or professional adequacy of any design, model, building or asset. It does not assess the respondent, their competence, or their standing to practise.

This assessment and any report produced from it confer no certification, accreditation, licence, approval, registration, endorsement or professional status of any kind, on any person or organisation.

They are not evidence of compliance with any regulation, building code, standard, mandate, contract, appointment or client requirement, and must not be presented as such — to a client, an authority having jurisdiction, an insurer, a certifying body, or in a tender or prequalification submission.

No BIM software holds local-authority compliance certification in any jurisdiction. Compliance rests with the Appointing Party and the Lead Appointed Party. Software is never a legal party to it.

The inputs are self-reported by the respondent and computed from a file the respondent supplies. No third party has witnessed, inspected, checked or attested to any answer, measurement or result.

Results reflect what the respondent reported and what their file contained at the moment of assessment, at the scope they declared. They are not a statement of fact about the organisation.

If a respondent’s work requires insurance, professional indemnity, a licence, certification, registration, or a formal qualification — under their regulations, contract, appointment, or a client’s requirements — that’s theirs to sort out directly with whoever requires it.

This report substitutes for none of it, in whole or in part.

Nothing in this toolkit or its outputs is insurance, indemnity, legal, regulatory or professional advice. Whether working to open standards affects any cover or obligation is a matter for the respondent’s insurer and legal counsel. Two facts are offered only as context for that conversation: warranty disclaimers are near-universal in software licensing, proprietary licences included; and professional indemnity insures the professional, not the tool.

Figures published by this toolkit are either measured from a named individual model, cited from a public source, or aggregated from assessments taken — and are labelled accordingly. A measurement from one building is not an industry statistic and must not be quoted as one.

Coverage and validity are reported as separate figures. A result showing well-formed data says nothing about whether the right data is present. No single headline score is produced.

This toolkit supports academic research and is a work in progress. Its readiness dimensions, assessment criteria, capability thresholds and weightings are subject to expert validation and pilot testing, and will change. Results produced under one version are not directly comparable with results produced under another.

Each report states the versions under which it was produced. Quote them whenever you quote a result.

The toolkit

The OpenBIM Readiness Assessment Toolkit is a research instrument developed under the project Development of an OpenBIM Readiness Assessment Toolkit for Digital Infrastructure Management. It assesses readiness across governance, people and skills, technology, data and standards, and organisational processes. The study is set in the context of infrastructure delivery in the UAE. The full proposal is reproduced at The research proposal.

Funding

Supported by a research grant awarded to Mohd Faizal Bin Yusof, value US$5,000. Software development was contracted separately to REFREX SDN BHD under quotation QTN.KFK.260703-01. Full award details are published with the first citable release.

The funder had no role in the design of the assessment framework, the collection or analysis of responses, the writing of any report, or the decision to submit for publication.

Declaration of competing interests

The proposal describes the reference benchmark as “an existing open-source, browser-based OpenBIM platform” and states that “the platform is not the subject of the study”. That platform is BIM OOTB. The developers contracted to build this toolkit are also the developers of that platform. This is declared as a competing interest.

Three measures address it, and each can be checked rather than taken on trust:

1. Assessment criteria are anchored to published standards — ISO 19650, ISO 12006-2, buildingSMART IFC — and the capability ladder is taken verbatim from ISO/IEC 33020. The platform appears as what the proposal itself calls “a concrete, working example … rather than an abstract ideal”.

2. Scoring is a deterministic function of the responses. Any third party can reproduce a score from the same inputs and the same published versions.

3. The instrument can return a negative result for the open route, including that it is not yet viable for a given organisation’s regulatory or capability position.

No commercial relationship arises between a respondent and either party as a result of taking an assessment. The platform is free and open source; the toolkit is free to use and requires no account.

Data availability

No personal data is collected. Model files supplied by respondents are processed entirely in the respondent’s browser and are never transmitted. Version 0.1 has no submission endpoint, so no response data is collected or stored by any party. Where submission is offered in a future version it will be optional and anonymous, with the exact payload shown before sending.

Ethics

The toolkit collects no participant data in its current version. Any ethics determination for the wider study rests with the researcher's institution and is published with the first citable release.

A participant-facing consent statement is nevertheless published now, at the point in the assessment where submission would occur, so that it can be reviewed before it ever governs a real submission. It states who is running the study, exactly what would be collected, that taking part is voluntary and withheld from no feature, that a submission could not be withdrawn once sent because nothing identifying the respondent is included, and how long data would be kept. The ethics approval reference is shown there as an explicit placeholder until the institution issues one; it is not asserted.

Use of generative AI

Generative AI was used in developing this toolkit and in preparing its documentation. All assessment criteria, capability thresholds and scoring logic were reviewed and trace to the cited standards.

Separately and by design, the instrument invites the respondent to use their own AI service to conduct the interview. The toolkit bundles no language model and makes no model calls on a respondent’s behalf.

Licence and citation

Source code is available at github.com/red1oon/bim-ootb under readiness/. Licence terms and a citable DOI are issued with the first tagged release; until then this is a pre-release draft and should not be cited.

Author of record and corresponding author: Mohd Faizal Bin Yusof. Every factual claim the toolkit makes, the source behind it and how far that source was read are set out at Sources and verification, together with the project’s stated limitations and a correspondence address.

Status

Research instrument in development. Criteria, thresholds and weightings are subject to expert validation and will change. Results produced under different versions are not directly comparable; each report states the versions under which it was produced.