~model view definition XML
In the IFC standard, a lot of agreements have been made. It can be difficult for software developers to support all these agreements. Sometimes their software tool doesn’t need to hold all that data. For these cases, they can create a ‘Model View Definition’ (MVD). In a MVD they indicate what parts of IFC they support.
Previously, MVDs were created as text documents or spreadsheets. This often led to a degree of uncertainty. That’s why mvdXML has been developed: a standard for technical description what the MVD looks like.
The intention is that software tools will support mvdXML. This way it is possible to check if all necessary data is present in an IFC model; a certain MVD is automatically extracted from a more complete IFC dataset; etc.
A lot of people think that you can use MVDs to check whether this data meets a number of preconditions. For example, if all doors have a minimum width. This was not originally part of MVD or mvdXML. MVDs only describe the requirements on a schema level; i.e. the level of the standard definitions.