The primary purpose of this International Standard is the provision of data structures for electronic product catalogues to transmit building services product data automatically into models of building services software applications. This includes a meta model for the specification of product classes and their properties and a meta model for the product data which is exchanged in product catalogues. Product data has to follow the specifications for their product groups.

The standard series is split into two areas:
— Basic concepts like conceptual models, languages, geometry representations, and XML schemas for data exchange are provided in the Conceptual Parts of the standard series (Parts with a one digit number).
— Using these resources, the Content Parts of this International Standard define for various product groups of building services concrete models for the description and the exchange of products.

The basic concepts which are provided by the standard series include the following:

— resources for the specification of selection properties and a selection property tree guiding the selection process to identify the appropriate product variant from a parametric electronic catalogue;

— resources for the specification of dependent properties and their computational functions to compute their values in dependency from installation parameters;

— resources for the specification of composition relationships between products which can be used to model structures like bill of materials or accessory relationships;
— resources for a parametric constructed solid geometry (CSG) based geometry representation containing specific CSG elements geometrical elements which are typical for building services products.