Innovative solutions for rapid and intelligent survey and assessment methods are required in maintenance, repair, retrofit and rebuild of enormous numbers of bridges in service throughout the world. Motivated by this need, a next-generation integrated bridge inspection system, called SeeBridge, has been proposed. An Information Delivery Manual (IDM) was compiled to specify the technical components, activities and information exchanges in the SeeBridge process, and a Model View Definition (MVD) was prepared to specify the data exchange schema to serve the IDM. The MVD was bound to the IFC4 Add2 data schema standard. The IDM and MVD support research and development of the system by rigorously defining the information and data that structure bridge engineers' knowledge. The SeeBridge process is mapped, parts of the data repositories are presented, and the future use of the IDM is discussed. The development underlines the real potential for automated inspection of infrastructure at large, because it demonstrates that the hurdles in the way of automated acquisition of detailed and semantically rich models of existing infrastructure are computational in nature, not instrumental, and are surmountable with existing technologies.

The Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) provide a comprehensive, standardized data format for the vendor-neutral exchange of digital building models. Accordingly, it is an essential basis for the establishment of Big Open BIM. This chapter describes in detail the structure of the data model and its use for the semantic and geometric description of a building and its building elements. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of the IFC data model. BackgroundThe idea of Building Information Modeling is based on the consistent use of a comprehensive building model as a basis for all data exchange operations (see Chap. 1). This avoids the need to manually re-enter data or information already created, and reduces the accompanying risk of errors. In addition to the numerous data exchange

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The paper reports on the buildingSMART International project IFC-Bridge that developed an extension of the vendor-neutral data exchange standard Industry Foundation Classes (IFC). The paper highlights the importance of a well-defined development process and the involvement of an international expert panel. It also discusses the need to focus on "low hanging fruits" by considering only the most widespread bridge types and implementing the data exchange scenarios that provide the most benefit. The paper describes both the development process and the outcome-the actual extension of the IFC standard. In this regard, emphasis is given to the general principles of extending IFC, such as minimizing the number of new entities.

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