Minutes of ISO TC 184/SC 4/WG 3

Parksville, BC, Canada

2009-05-18 to 2009-05-21

ISO TC 184/SC 4/WG 3 N2589

Minutes by: Gerald Radack

Minutes date: 2009-06-04

Attendees

Discussion

Monday 29-05-18

[From notes by Allison Barnard Feeney.]

The agenda (WG 3 N2587) was adopted as proposed.

The group reviewed the SC 4 Chair's list of challenges.

AP 241 needs to provide new stage dates to the SC 4 Chair.

The new ISO Directives, Part 1, allow committees the choice of a two-month, three-month, or four-month CD ballot. It was asked whether the national bodies effectively provide comments on a two-month ballot. It was suggested to use a shorter time frame for shorter documents and a longer time frame for larger documents. The Directives still require an NWI ballot to be three months. Thus, a combined NWI/CD-TS ballot would have to be three months in length.

Team leaders were asked to be brief in team reports to the SC 4 plenaries. They were asked not speak to schedule slides, just show them. They were asked not to repeat plans for the week discussion while showing the team's schedule. Ideally, the schedule should be published in advance of the SC 4 meeting. A detailed agenda could be displayed, but the team leader should not read through the whole agenda. More detail can and should be provided in the WG 3 Plenary.

The Gear Unit part will be discussed in detail on Tuesday. It is intended to be a usage guide for using AP 214 to represent gear units. The document does not match any currently defined SC 4 products. The team is currently implementing a Gear ARM, which is an extension of the AP 214 ARM. This would not be interoperable with an AP 214 ARM implementation, since it includes entities not in the AP 214 ARM. Lothar Klein said that this scope could be satisfied by modules and believes the Gear Unit document should become a modular AP. This proposal will be discussed on Tuesday.

Gerry Radack, WG 3 convener, expressed concern that participation of some teams in WG 3 meetings has become spotty. He asked how the cross-team communication and coordination can be achieved in the current environment. It was noted that one impediment to team participation is the difficulty to get to meetings. David Odendhal of Boeing stated that it took him a full day to get to Parksville from Seattle. If we could locate meetings near an international hub, we might have better luck getting people to attend. Additionally, if we could locate meetings near industrial centers where there are businesses interested in using our standards we could draw in additional people.

Dr. Radack will communicate to meeting organizers that WG 3 prefers industrial centers over resort areas.

The following teams will likely not be meeting in Rotterdam: T10, T22, T23, and T24.

The following teams will likely not be meeting in Edinburgh: T10 and T24.

It was agreed to have a WG 3 conference call in between meetings, and to use a SharePoint site for collaboration. Teams will be expected to share their work and communicate via this site.

A lot of work is scheduled to come to an end at the end of this year. It was agreed to revisit WG 3's meeting requirements for following meetings at the Rotterdam meeting.

Actions from PPC/ Convener meeting

ISO 15926 parts 7, 8 and 9: T25 does not have the manpower to deliver these parts for CD-TS ballot on the current schedule. T25 will provide updated stage dates to the SC 4 Chair.

The RDF and Gellish project is also having similar resource issues. It will provide an updated schedule to the SC 4 Chair.

Dr. Radack asked that teams notify WG 3 of NWIs that are on the horizon.

Any parts to be published in 2009 must be delivered to ISO Central Secretariat by 2009-09-15. This means that they should be sent for convener review no later than 2009-08-30.

APs 241 and 209, and ISO 15926-10 will provide updated schedules this week.

AP 241 will talk to PPC this week to devise a plan for delivery that avoids cancellation. SC 4 may have to pass a resolution to prevent cancellation of AP 241. SC 4 may be able to request waiver of limit dates assuming delivery within 4 years.

The AP 239 e2 team is about to submit a NWI ballot. The documents have been submitted to the conveners for review.

WG 3 members were asked to use the address wg3convener at dcnicn dot com for WG 3 convener business.

Goals for the week:

• schedule updates
• get -well plan for APs at risk of cancellation,
• resolution on action plan for Gears document.

The convergence of APs 203 and 214 was requested. AP 214 has not taken a decision regarding modularization. Discussion will be initiated in the T 19 meeting at 1300 this afternoon.

Lothar Klein raised issue regarding CAX-IF implementers agreements and usage guides. When usage guides go beyond what is done in the standard, such as the validation strategy "cloud of points", he said this should be fed back to the standards process. Each team should be maintaining their standards. If industry is doing stuff that we should be feeding back to our standards what is the reason this is not happening? It was noted that attendance at SC 4 meetings and CAX-IF meetings is mostly disjoint. However, CAX-IF consists mainly of PDES, Inc. and ProSTEP members, and those organizations are both liaisons to SC 4. Liaisons are present at the SC 4 meetings and they should present information on usage guides at these meetings. The SEDS process should be used to record practices from usage guides that should be fed back into SC 4 standards.

It was agreed that WG 3 would like more visibility on what implementation guides are out there. Not all CAX-IF documents are public, only ones that have been agreed to and implemented. WG 3 would like to be made aware of agreements that are not public yet but will become public.

Lothar Klein and Dr. Radack will draft an action item to SC 4 Secretariat to solicit information regarding implementer agreements.

What sort of guidance on standards implementation should we be providing along with our standards? This question will be addressed in Open Technical Forum Monday night.

AP 241 and ISO 15926 Oil and Gas will harmonize.

Thursday 2009-05-21

Industry Foundation Classes (IFCs)

Thomas Liebich, the liaison from BuildSmart to SC 4, gave a presentation on the Industry Foundation Classes (IFCs) (see WG 3 N2590). BuildSmart plans to submit IFC version 3 for balloting as an International Standard.

The IFC schema is available on a public website (http://www.buildingsmart.com/bim). It uses geometry based on Part 42. It does not have separate ARM and AIM schemas. All relationships are in the EXPRESS model, but properties are defined separately.

Because of the large size of building models, BuildSmart is interested in an EXPRESS binary format. People are also pushing to go to XML. Investigations have indicated that a Part 28 file is about five time as large as the corresponding Part 21 file. XML is good for partial exchange (e.g., one column of a building).

IFC has view definitions, which are similar to conformance classes.

There is a certification process. It currently costs 5000 Euros to certify an application.

Team reports

It was agreed that AP 203 and 214 convergence would be desirable from a technical standpoint. A strategy needs to be developed. The AP 214 team will discuss AP 203 convergence with AP 214 stakeholders, identify business needs and potential sources of funding.

See WG 3 N2588 for team report slides.

Next Meeting

A WG 3 conference call is planned for 2009-09-02. An announcement will be sent on the WG 3 exploder.

The next face-to-face meeting will be in Rotterdam in conjunction with the SC 4 meeting. WG 3 sessions are planned for 2009-11-09, 1030-1200 and 2009-11-12, 1530-1700.

Action Items