Open Standards
An open standard is a specification that is publicly available, developed through a transparent process, and not controlled by a single vendor. Anyone can implement it, any software can support it, and the data it produces is not tied to a commercial product's lifecycle.
Open standards are the connective tissue of interoperability. Without them, each software vendor defines its own formats, and exchanging data between tools means lossy translation — with information dropped or misrepresented at every handoff. With open standards, data can move between tools, organizations, and generations of software without degrading.
Standards CDT Uses
Building Scale — buildingSMART International (bSI)
buildingSMART International (bSI) is the organization that develops and maintains open standards for the built environment. CDT aligns with the following bSI standards:
IFC — Industry Foundation Classes
ISO 16739 — the open format for building and infrastructure models.
IFC defines a schema of thousands of element types (IfcWall, IfcBeam, IfcSpace, IfcSensor, and so on) along with their geometric representation, properties, relationships, and lifecycle attributes. A model exported to IFC can be opened by any compliant application without a licence from the authoring tool's vendor.
CDT ingests IFC natively. When you upload an .ifc file, the platform parses the full schema — geometry, property sets, quantity sets, relationships — and makes it available in the viewer and in the database.
IDS — Information Delivery Specification
buildingSMART standard — machine-readable requirements for what information a model must contain.
An IDS file defines which elements must be present in a model, what properties they must have, and what values are acceptable. CDT's BIM viewer can load an IDS file against a loaded model and visually flag which elements pass or fail each requirement. This turns abstract information requirements (exchange information requirements, employer's information requirements) into automated, visual checks.
BCF — BIM Collaboration Format
buildingSMART standard — open format for communicating issues within BIM models.
BCF separates issue data (topic text, viewpoint, author, status, assigned party) from the model file itself, so coordination issues can be shared between teams using different authoring tools. A BCF topic created in CDT opens correctly in Revit, ArchiCAD, or any other compliant tool — and vice versa.
bSDD — buildingSMART Data Dictionary
A library of standardized classifications, properties, and their allowed values — covering building element types, materials, and attributes. CDT maps building records to bSDD classifications, enabling filtering and analysis by standardized typology rather than free-text labels.
Urban Scale — Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)
The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) develops standards for geospatial data exchange. CDT uses the following OGC standards:
GeoJSON
A JSON-based format for encoding geographic features — points, lines, polygons — with associated properties. The de facto standard for web-based geospatial data exchange, used by virtually all open data portals in Canada.
WMS — Web Map Service
OGC standard for requesting geo-registered map images from a remote server. CDT can display WMS layers from government and municipal sources alongside local data, including their full metadata.
WMTS — Web Map Tile Service
OGC standard for serving pre-rendered or on-demand map tiles. Based on WMS, extended to support tile-based delivery for performance. CDT uses WMTS to display base maps and contextual raster layers.
Vector Tiles
Generated by CDT's Martin tile server from PostGIS queries, following the Mapbox Vector Tile specification — an de facto open standard. Delivers geospatial data as binary-encoded tiles, enabling efficient rendering of large datasets in the browser.
Why Open Standards Matter for CDT
No vendor lock-in
Data stored in IFC, GeoJSON, or LAS is not tied to any software product. If a vendor changes its pricing, discontinues a product, or disappears, the data remains accessible.
Long-term preservation
Open ISO standards are maintained independently of commercial interests. IFC models created today will remain readable by compliant software decades from now — unlike proprietary formats whose support depends on a single company's decisions.
Interoperability across disciplines
Architecture, structural engineering, MEP, civil, and planning teams use different software. Open standards allow them to share a single model without format negotiation. IFC was designed precisely for this: each discipline exports to IFC, and any other discipline can ingest it.
Collaboration across organizations
Open standards enable different government agencies, municipalities, universities, and industry partners to contribute data to the same platform without agreeing on a common software stack. Canada's open data ecosystem — hundreds of portals in different formats — is only navigable because the underlying formats (GeoJSON, WMS) are standardized.
Reduced cost and barrier to entry
Proprietary BIM software costs approximately $3,000 per user per year. Open-source tools that implement open standards — Bonsai/BlenderBIM, FreeCAD, That Open Company's libraries — cost nothing and are freely modifiable. CDT itself is free and open-source, built entirely on this ecosystem.
openBIM in Practice
CDT is committed to openBIM as an operational principle, not just a marketing label. This means:
- IFC is the only building model format ingested natively (no
.rvtor.dwgimport) - BCF topics are exportable and importable in the open standard format
- IDS validation operates on the open schema
- All BIM processing uses open-source libraries (web-ifc, That Open Engine, Fragments)
- The platform codebase is public and forkable under an open-source licence