Another great year for the ETIM standards has passed. Before we return to our families for Christmas celebrations, let’s look back to what we accomplished in 2024 and what’s in store for 2025.
Succesfull launch of ETIM xChange
On February 19th we started off with a bang by launching our first ever self-developed standard protocol for automated product data exchange. ETIM xChange has been developed to become an international Master Data exchange format based on the combining requirements of EMDG, BMEcat, DICO and FAB-DIS. With the actual exchange protocol and validation schema written in JSON, it meets the requirements of modern data exchange technologies and legislations. ETIM xChange also serves the interests of product data xChange on the North American and the Australian continent. The purpose is to in the end replace the BMEcat XML-based exchange format, that has been labelled as “legacy” for which ETIM has maintained an ETIM-specific customized guideline for the last decade.
Increasing exposure and interest for ETIM MC
With international financial support in place, we were able to welcome Benjamin Sjölander to our team whose main task will be to manage all standardisation work around ETIM Modelling Classes, a standard around parameters of geometric families which has great potential. After the first 5 countries (Netherlands, Germany, Norway, France and Italy), more countries are taking an interest. We have had presentations on Construction week in London and we have been discussing the adoption of ETIM MC in various local ETIM chapters.
ETIM Forum ’24, Rome
In the beginning of November the entire insider-community of ETIM got together in Rome where we combined our annual update and meetings with the General Assembly and the General Technical Committee. This year our theme was Artificial Intelligence. Our newest member of the team Benjamin Sjölander made a very good first impression with his maiden speech on this topic.
ETIM-10.0 Released in combination with IXF 3.1
On December 10th ETIM 10.0 was released with 5640 classes, of which 159 are new. In this release:
- Introduction of feature groups, that allows you to group features according to their types (e.g. Measurements, electronics, material, colour). See here a complete list of all feature groups:
https://prod.etim-international.com/FeatureGroup - Feature Groups has also been added to the IXF format which resulted in a new IXF version 3.1
- ETIM Groups have had a serious cleanup.
- Overall 5264 change requests have been processed.
Environmental developments
We had a couple of interesting sessions with our environmental data working group. We were asked to present and share ideas on a workshop session of the CEN/CENELEC JTC 24 that is working on Europe’s new Digital Product Passport regulations. Our new ETIM xChange format combined with our ETIM classification model is more than ready to meet any data requirements coming from that initiative.
Exciting things on our roadmap for 2025
- Publish latest versions of ETIM standards on bSDD (ETIM-10.0, ETIM MC ’25 and ETIM xChange v1.1)
- Launch of the ETIM online academy
- ETIM Forum 2025 – Valencia
- Focus on Maintenance projects within ETIM: update guidelines, clean up and improve the ETIM model, improve website.
- Start the work on ETIM-11.0 with our community
Best wishes..
We would like to wish all of you, and your loved ones a Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year. We are looking forward to continue our efforts for making a difference in the digital transition of construction and technical industries with our community of supporting members. Together we will provide a complete, easy to implement, practical classification system and exchange protocol in 2025 and beyond.
Kind regards,
Marc Habets
Karl Pappas
Benjamin Sjölander
Jeroen van der Holst