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IFC4 has been finalized, and it is officially released

After over 6 years of development and over 1100 issues being resolved, on 12. March 2013 buildingSMART international has finally released the new generation of IFC schemas - IFC4. It will now be the basis of future work of establishing new open BIM enabled work flows by defining new IFC4 based model view definitions. The official IFC4 release includes both the IFC4 EXPRESS schema to support current STEP-based IFC exchanges, and the ifcXML4 XSD schema to support new simple ifcXML transactions.
buildingsmart/news/

An Epic Thread on Revit Worksets and Worksharing

63 comments on this Linked in thread may be to much to digest on a weekend but worth a look .

Some thoughts on Revit Worksets and Worksharing

The different thoughts of respected and experienced users on this subject may be an eye-opener for some.

If not only for this read the comment by Kyle Bernhard, he is the Product Line Manager, Building Design Suite for Autodesk. A good Insight form the Factories and the past of this feature .

here his reply.

1. The Role of Worksets in Modern Revit

In order to understand how Worksets fit into Revit today, you need to understand how they got there in the first place.
Worksets were our our first foray into the realm of true Worksharing in Revit (one model, multiple users). Initially, you had to make a whole Workset editable to make any changes, effectively locking out the rest of the team from making any changes to those elements. The Visibility control functionality for Worksets was implemented as means to help identify what Elements were on what Workset.
Recognizing that Worksets alone were not flexible enough to facilitate productive collaboration in many cases, we implemented Element Borrowing. This enabled the transparent borrowing of elements when a user operation required them to be editable, without the need to explicitly "check out" of the entire Workset that contained them.
So Element Borrowing is really the implementation of Worksharing in modern Revit. Worksets were never deprecated, since many existing users at the time still used them for their original purpose. Even today, we see the pre-Element Borrowing understanding of Worksets discussed and implemented in the market. Ultimately, that's our fault for not communicating as effectively as possible with the Revit community.
With their original use usurped by Element Borrowing, Worksets today are mainly a means to apply an additional Classification of Elements in the model. There are certainly lower-frequency use cases where they are still used as originally designed, but that is the exception rather than the rule.
So, it's not the least bit surprising to see all sorts of different uses for them out in the market, given Revit's horizontal nature these days, and the needs to classify thing on a model.

2. Worksets, Visibility, and Memory

Turning off the visibility of a Workset in a View does not unload it from memory. It's the same thing as toggling a Category in a View -> Those hidden Elements, and their 3D faces visible in the current View Extents, aren't parsed by the graphics system, resulting in View loading and manipulation improvements.

3. Worksets and Memory

Revit loads all elements in a model into memory at load, at least in a serialized form, regardless of whether their Workset is loaded. We do this because we need to know their relationships to other Elements during Model Regeneration, in case they need to be updated as a result of a change in other model Elements. If such a circumstance occurs, they get fully "parsed" into memory and modified as the change propagates. The only way to completely unload Elements, as astutely pointed out earlier in the thread, is to place them in a linked model and unload that model.
Unloading a Workset effectively ensures that the Elements it contains are never fully loaded into Memory, unless Model Regeneration requires them to do so. It's kind of like a master switch next to the toggles we have for visibility in each individual View in the model.

4. The Future of Worksets

I really can't publicly go into any significant detail on where we are headed with Worksets - or Worksharing, visibility control, scheduling control, and the many other uses they have today - but I can say that we consider this a critical piece of Revit functionality, and one that's not fundamentally flawed in a significant way. Yes, as many have articulated, there are areas for improvement, and those improvements are part of the many areas we consider as we chart the future path of the product.

Revit Templates at Autodesk Building Owners

This Place is worth a look when looking for Building Owner based templates and COBie Information Autodesk Building Owners

New COBie Toolkit for Revit

Autodesk now provides a COBie Toolkit

The COBie Toolkit produces COBie v2 deliverables in conjunction with a Revit model
Installs into new and existing Revit project models

• Creates Revit parameters for objects that need to track COBie data fields

•  Contains an update macro that can keep parameters in sync with a set of standard COBie fields

• Provides export capabilities to a COBie formatted text file for intake into a MS Excel COBie spreadsheet objects that need to track COBie data fields

• Contains an update macro that can keep parameters in sync with a set of standard COBie fields

• Provides export capabilities to a COBie formatted text file for intake into a MS Excel COBie spreadsheet

      http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk

New York City Sets BIM Standards

The New York City Department of Design and Construction (DDC) has issued building information modeling (BIM) standards for new public building design projects valued between $15 million and $50 million. The DDC hopes requiring BIM for these projects will establish framework for future construction.
DDC_BIM_Guidelines.pdf

LOD Managment finaly gone Sensible

The United States Army Corps of Engineers, Naval Facilities Engineering Command and the Civil Engineer of the Air Force have released the USACE BIM Minimum Modelling Matrix (M3)
It is the most sensible Document regarding LOD Management in BIM i have seen so far.
If the Matrix from the NATSPEC National BIM Guide or the Object Element Matrix from the VA BIM Guide simply scared the hell out of you.

Have a look at this
USACEBIMMinimumModelingMatrix


They also updated the USACE BIM Requirements
https://cadbim.usace.army.mil/

And if this is not enought for you, have a read throug all the links here
http://revitworx.blogspot.com.au/p/standards-guides.html

IFC where it all started 1994 - 2012

What happened
Why does this great Idea of IFC remind me of Linux, Open GL, World peace....
Watch this promotional Video from 1994  its 18 years now what happened...
better what didn’t
Would IFC have truly happened with a capitalistic concept driving it.
Enjoy the video of a truly great idea from 18 years ago.

IFC - Where it all started - The End of Babel - Part 1/2

AEC (UK) BIM Protocols v2.0 now available

AEC (UK) has produced a good and well written set of standards covering BIM and Revit as well as other Softwares Protocols. Certainly there would be a need to adjust these Documents to other countries or adjust to the local procedures of the industry. But they are a great guide how a good set of documents should look like. 
http://aecuk.wordpress.com/

ISO/TS 12911:2012 “Framework for building information modelling (BIM) guidance”

BIM Execution plans?

ISO/TS 12911:2012 “Framework for building information modelling (BIM) guidance” is now published and available for use.

Abstract 
ISO/TS 12911:2012 establishes a framework for providing specifications for the commissioning of building information modelling (BIM).
It is applicable to any range of modelling of buildings and building-related facilities, from a portfolio of assets at a single site or multiple sites, to assets at a single small building and at any constituent system, subsystem, component or element. It is applicable to any asset type, including most infrastructure and public works, equipment and material. BIM processes are applicable across the entire life cycle of a portfolio, facility or component, which can span inception to end-of-use. The main user of the framework is the information manager, who utilizes the framework to assist in structuring an international-, national-project- or facility-level BIM guidance document. The framework can also be used for BIM guidance provided by application providers.

Comments from the makers.
This standard was initiated in 2008 within ISO TC 59 SC 13 WG 09. We felt that it represented a missing link : a systematic way for executives, managers and users to share and re-use specific outcomes: it structures the strategic decision on a desired outcome, the managerial consequences, and the required ‘operator’ inputs. The Standard puts stress on the ability to merge such Guidance documents together (to define the BIM execution plan for a project, for example) and to express the requirements in a (potentially automated) testable format .

http://infostore.saiglobal.com

http://www.iso.org