OPEN BIM™ is a unique approach to the collaborative design and realization of buildings allowing project members to participate regardless of the tools they use. In contrast to CLOSED (or “proprietary”) BIM the OPEN strategy offers great benefits to building professionals:
- Project members can work with the best-of-breed solutions in their respective fields without risking exclusion from certain BIM projects.
- Project members can maintain full control over software upgrades independently from their peers on the different projects they participate in.
- Workflow integration results in greatly reduced coordination errors compared to sheer file compatibility of the different software tools.
- Due to open standards accessibility of BIM, data is provided for the entire lifecycle of buildings including construction and operation.
GRAPHISOFT®, Tekla® and other members of the buildingSMART® alliance launched a global program to promote OPEN BIM throughout the AEC industry.
The OPEN BIM program offers the necessary resources including definitions, requirements and best practices to help the implementation of OPEN collaboration workflows. Globally-coordinated OPEN BIM efforts run under a common OPEN BIM™ branding available to all program participants.
Who should participate and what are the requirements?
The OPEN BIM program welcomes not only software vendors but AEC practices and AEC projects as well. The OPEN BIM logo is a guarantee that a software solution, a design an engineering practice or a building project fully meets the requirements of open collaboration. Overall requirements are rather straightforward:
- Follow the OPEN BIM™ workflow guidelines
- Support current “open” standards such as IFC
- Engage with peers regardless of their software
- Support reference-model based BIM workflows
- Accept terms and conditions of the brand licensing
Although OPEN BIM™ is a serious initiative, we like to have a little fun, too, sometime either so please welcome the OPEN BIM blues ;-)