Application research of lFC in construction industry

Information exchange and sharing is the basic request in construction informationization. in order to realize this goal, it is necessary to set up a standard. The open construction product data expression and exchange standard Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) is widely used specially for building and construction life cycle information. This paper gives the introduction to IFC, including two characteristics and architecture schema, explains four layers in IFC model and the actual applications. It presents three suggestions for Chinese government from the view of exerting government's influence during the process of standard development, encouraging enterprises to participate actively, and resolving the shortage of professionals.