List of project participants in IFC

Well, this might seem a bit strange. Also, not sure if privacy rules allow this in your country or project. But it’s about the possibilities of IFC – you don’t have to use everything.

Actually it is possible to store the names and contact data of the people involved in your project right inside your IFC file. There are special classes for this, namely IfcPerson, IfcOrganisation, IfcPostalAddress and IfcTelecomAddress.

So, instead of passing around Excel files with this data you could include it in your project model. As you have control over your data you can easily obscure it before sending it to people outside your company.

Why would you store your contacts together with your model? Some would stretch the term “single source of truth”. Others might use advanced features of IFC like versioning, inventory or asset responsibility, work plans and resource assignment.

By the way, if you want to know where a specific IFC class is referenced in the schema, simply scroll down to bottom of the page in the documentation. You will see some are quite intensively cross-referenced.