
Meet the COBie format. It is the acronym for Construction Operations Building Information Exchange.
It is an Excel spreadsheet of all the assets that are kept and managed in a building. It’s just space and equipment.
Cobie and IFC
Today, we are going to expand a bit more our COBie concepts, in order to better understand what a IFC file is and how a COBie file relates to it.
Basically, IFC is a file that has all the information about a building. We are seldom interested in managing all this information; we usually care more about the part that is directly related to our work.
We can see COBie as a subset of the necessary information for the management and operation of a building. This is called Model View Definition, which works like a filter that selects only the information we need. COBie is a Model View Definition (MVD) homologated by Building Smart.
In today’s video, the relation betwen a IFC file and a COBie file will be introduced. Don’t worry so much about the technical details; leave them for the specialists. Focus on what is the most importante part: how everything is related.