buildingSMART is an international collaboration organised as regional chapters across the globe. Its members are drawn from the facilities industry, designers, engineers, contactors, software developers, acedemics and owners and occupiers.

Its mission is to deliver the specific standards that will allow the improvement in the quality of the sector's performance and products. The central proposition is that 'shared and structured infromation' can be reused, checked and re-purposed, reducing wasted time, effort and failures.

 There are three main areas:

• IFC - (informally "Information for Construction") - the facilities Industry Foundation Classes. This is a highly developed schema that can be used to represent the objects, processes, actors, properties and relationships that describe an exisiting or proposed facility. The IFC schema contains over 700 'objects': examples include IfcDoor, IfcActor, IfcBoundingBox, IfcRelElements, IfcPropertySingleValue.  The most important thing is that the IFC describe a product (a facility, or a fan-coli unit) not the documents currently used to hint at the product (drawings, perspectives, writtten text etc).
• IDM - Information Delivery Manual - a method that allows users to examine and document their current or future processes and identify where information is exchanged. Each exchnage is documented and the functional parts (the concepts or "units of information") are summarised. There may be other ways of achieving the exchnage, but if IFCs are used, then thie method then goes deeper and identifies the specific objects in IFC and what expectations there are for the data - for example not only that spaces should be classified, but also which classiifcation system is expected. The specific objects (etc) neded may be used to define a subset of the whole IFC schema, whcih some applications may confirm they can supply and/or absorb. The subset is called a model view defintion, and the most common is called the 'coordination view' - demanding enough information to coordinate spatially and identify the objects involved in clashes.
• IFD - an International Framework Dictionary. The next level of collaboration can  use a common dictionary of terms to ensure that named objects and properties are recognised as the same (or different: currently a k-value can be an insulation value in a wall or a roughness value in a duct). This cataloue of concepts holds multiple synonyms, and even terms in other languages.

The aerospace, shipbuilding, automtotive, process plant and defence industries all do the same - they all have a triple set of schemas.  buildingSMART produces these  three schemas for the facilities infndustry.

The schema is developed as an "Express" schema (.exp) it is also availbale as an XML schema (.xsd) or a UML Rose schema (.rc1).  But a schema is a specification - it exists as a text document. To be used, it must be realised somehow. There are three ways a facility can exist as IFC data:

• There are specific databases that can hold IFC, IDM and IFD data. These are quite specialised, as normal database solutions have until recently proved inadequate to represent the complex relationships between 700 "tables".
• A text format called STEP physical format (.ifc) . They are very dense text files, and to read or write such files you really have to know the schema.
• A text format called XML (.ifcxml). These are less dense, and can be written and read using standard, freely available tools.

The other schemas, IDM and IFD,  can also be represented these three ways, and they also have spreadsheet based formats.