Built on open standards
We love open standards. We use them and make them available to you where we can. We believe open standards help build better world where people can work together without unnecessary barriers. Under the hood, we build our products on the open-source xbim Toolkit, which provides 100% pure implementation of several IFC standard versions (IFC2x3, IFC4, IFC 4.3). That is a fundamental open standard for information modelling in construction industry. It is also published as ISO 16739 There are other open standards maintained by buildingSMART. We support BCF (BIM Collaboration Format) for communication. And we work with our partners to see how bSDD (buildingSMART Data Dictionary) could improve common understanding of construction concepts.
Our API also uses several developer-facing open standards. We use OData (Open Data Protocol) to give you a freedom to "slice & dice" the data any way you like. This gives you a way to filter data as well as to select and expand only a sub-graph of the data structures alongside other features which make up for a modern and flexible framework for REST application development. We also use OpenAPI as an open standard for publishing the REST API contracts and endpoints. This makes is easy to develop or generate SW clients for almost any language. One more thing to help you develop with us quickly and efficiently.
Capture: AIM API
Asset Information Modelling API is there to provide access to all built assets, models, components, spaces, zones and their relations. It also allows you to define fine grained access control to assets and models. While the data schema is fundamentally backed by IFC definitions (hundreds of classes), it provides much higher level API access (about 20 classes). That makes it suitable for rapid BIM application development.
Share: Comms API
Communication is essential in all things we all do. Communication in construction industry suffers from context isolation. This API helps to bring the communication to the context of the model. Heavily based on BIM Collaboration Format, it references models and components from AIM API and keeps all the conversations in the right context. We also provide Revit Addin which can populate AIM and Comms with the right selection of data, 3D, views and documents.
Automate: Flow API
This area of the API is not yet in production. But we work hard on it. I brings the power of the open-source xbim Toolkit to the cloud. Developers and technical people can develop automated processing pipelines for BIM data validation as well as for data extractions and conversions. Yes, it builds on the concepts of Continuous Integration well known from software development. All is also available through the API. So, you may develop the automation pipeline and use API to embed it into your product.