The Dutch Revit Standard (NLRS) officially recognized as an Open Standard

The board of the Revit Standards foundation is pleased and proud to announce that the Dutch Revit Standard (NLRS) has been recognized as an open standard by the Standardization Forum.

The Standardization Forum was set up by the Dutch government to test open ICT standards and to encourage the use of Open Standards. The use of Open Standards enables error-free data exchange between ICT systems. They have the possibility to recognize Standards that meet certain preconditions as Open Standard.

A distinction is made between two variants: the so-called “pas-toe-of-leg-uit” Standards and the recommended Standards.

Recommended Standard

The NLRS is registered and recognized as recommended Standard. This means that if there are projects in which the Autodesk software package Revit is used, the government recommends that the NLRS be applied. There is therefore no obligation or recommendation to apply Revit.

Thanks to the recognition, the NLRS is now placed on the government-recommended list of Open Standards for the public sector. For the users, this means that they can trust that the NLRS is managed in a good, transparant and sustainable manner, thereby guaranteeing any investments that users make to implement the NLRS within their organization.

The NLRS is a user standard that is specified by the users of the Revit software package, independently of the supplier of this package. Revit is used by installation companies, construction companies, engineering firms, architects and building software companies.

Agreements have been made in the NLRS on the use of naming, model structure and the use of parameters in the software package Autodesk Revit. This allows Revit to export standardized and vendor-independent IFC files that have an unambiguous structure and are therefore uniformly importable and used by other software packages.

The Revit Standards Foundation was established as a management organization for the NLRS with the following goals:

  • Making the NLRS easily accessible;
  • To give substance to the ownership of the intellectual property of the NLRS, which is released under a Creative Commons license;
  • Forming an independent management organization with a technical committee that ensures the further development of the NLRS;
  • Monitoring clear participation procedures for the expansion of the NLRS;
  • Safeguarding the NLRS in the long term;

This inclusion of the NLRS on the list of recommended Open Standards show that the Revit Standards Foundation carries out the management of the NLRS in accordance with the basic principles of the Standardization Forum.