Dutch Revit Standards launched

July 1st, the Dutch Revit Standards, v1.0 has been published by the Dutch Revit Users Group. You can download them from here: www.revitgg.nl/index.php/download.

What are the Dutch Revit Standards (DRS)?

The DRS are a set of basic agreements for firms working with Revit, much like the ANZRS (Australian New Zealand Revit Standards) and the AEC (UK) BIM Standard for Autodesk Revit and NBS (UK) National BIM Library.
But in several important ways they are also different.

First let's look at the components the DRS share with other standards:
1. Naming conventions. For all major and minor aspects of Revit naming conventions have been set up, varying from the naming of project files to parameters, object styles, line types and so on.
2. Shared Parameters. A list of Shared Parameters is created for all disciplines.
3. Documented and free. The DRS are fully documented and free of charge. Created under a Creative Commons License a fair use for all interested is granted, with the exception of commercial reselling of the DRS.



But there are also areas where the DRS is unique in it's kind:
1. Incorporation of other standards. When creating the DRS the Dutch RUG specifically looked at other available standards and re-used elements of those standards whenever possible. We did so because for two reasons:
a. Because we feel it's unneccessary to reproduce work already done by very smart and capable others.
b. When all these international standards fit together, we work better together.

2. Incorporation of IFC. The DRS is the first Revit standards that fully incorporates IFC in it's workflow. People using the DRS no longer have to go through the painfully slow and difficult process of creating the necessary mapping from Revit to IFC. This has even resulted in the fact that our mapping tables are currently under examiniation by Autodesk to incorporate in the next Revit version. And further more, the Dutch RUG is the first outside party to contribute to the Autodesk Open Source IFC Exporter: we created the code that makes is possible to map custom Revit parameters to IFC parameters upon export.

3. Fully working template. Some other standards come with a basic template, some don't. None of them come with a template fully utilised to work from. For our users we created a basic template that has everything: system families defined, schedules, views, view templates, view filters, titleblocks and so on. The only thing left to do for new users is transfer their company standards.

4. Incorporporation of ALL disciplines. The current version just incorporates Architecture and Structure. At the moment we are working very hard to add MEP, which will probably be done by the end of this year. And at the moment, the first conversations about adding Facility Management requirements are on their way.

In short: the DRS is a fully working an utilised Revit standard, capable of working with IFC and by all disciplines in the AEC business. Any company downloading it can and will be working with it within a week.

The Dutch RUG is currently working on an English translation of the DRS and it's documentation, however, since the entire development until now has been voluntary, we are also looking at ways to get further development, including translations, funded. Until this is done it is very hard to give a specific timeframe for future developments or the translation process.

The DRS is created by Martijn de Riet for the Dutch Revit User Group.
More info on the Dutch Revit User Group: www.revitgg.nl
To download the DRS: www.revitgg.nl/index.php/download
More info on the author: www.mdr-advies.nl
To contact the Dutch RUG: info@revitgg.nl
To contact the author: info@mdr-advies.nl

Have fun!