Advances in the development and application of an open source model server for building information

The need for Building Information Model (BIM) servers to facilitate collaboration has been repeatedly reported in literature and stated by industry practitioners. To date, only a few commercial implementations of model servers are available. However, these applications are either limited to vendorspecific, proprietary data models or their complexity and pricing structure imposes a considerable threshold to their adoption by SMEs. The academic, standardization and development communities suffer a lack of open platforms that allows the integration and evaluation of research results and prototypes in a larger context. Although promising efforts aiming the creation of free and open platforms for a larger audience have been made in the past (Kiviniemi et al, 2005), none of these initiatives is still in existence to date. In this paper we report on the progress of the bimserver.org project, a collective effort to create a software framework that serves both as an open, low-cost entry into collaboration using shared building models for SMEs and as a test bed for research and development. We introduce conceptual, methodological and implementation specific advancements that have been made compared to earlier publications. Based on a series of interviews and a survey we report on user experiences that have been made by a diverse audience of architectural, engineering, project management companies as well as educational projects in academic environments and third party developers. A discussion of future research and development directions concludes this paper. Among these prospective additions to the framework are customizations and tailored solutions of external parties that use the open nature of the platform to suit their specific needs.