Reference study of IFC software support: The GeoBIM benchmark 2019—Part I

IFC, buildingSMART open standard for Building Information Models, is underused with respect to its promising potential, since, according the experience of practitioners and researchers working BIM, issues in standard's implementation use prevent effective use. Nevertheless, a systematic investigation these has never been performed, there thus insufficient evidence tackling problems. The GeoBIM benchmark project aimed at finding such by involving external volunteers, reporting on tools behaviour about relevant aspects (geometry, semantics, georeferencing, functionalities), analysed described this paper. Interestingly, few patterns are detectable different software standardised data, significant found their support standards, probably due very high complexity data model. This paper tandem Part II, describing results related CityGML, counterpart IFC within geoinformation.