Reference study of IFC software support: the GeoBIM benchmark 2019 -- Part I

IFC, buildingSMART open standard for Building Information Models, is underused with respect to its promising potential, since, according to the experience of practitioners and researchers working with BIM, issues in the standard's implementation and use prevent its effective use. Nevertheless, a systematic investigation of these issues has never been performed, and there is thus insufficient evidence for tackling the problems. The GeoBIM benchmark project is aimed at finding such evidence by involving external volunteers, reporting on tools behaviour about relevant aspects (geometry, semantics, georeferencing, functionalities), analysed and described in this paper. Interestingly, few patterns are detectable about the behaviour of different software with standardised data, and significant issues are found in their support of the standards, probably due to the very high complexity of the standard data model. This paper is in tandem with Part II, describing the results of the benchmark related to CityGML, counterpart of IFC within geoinformation.