Standards layer — the full ETIM measurements

Access and scale

• ETIM is free under the Open Data Commons Attribution Licence (ODC-By), downloadable in full.
• Its own API is Swagger-documented but returns 401 without credentials (OAuth2 client_id/secret, Release and Details services with filtering and paging).
• bSDD serves all of ETIM 10.1 free, with no auth: 5,640 classes, 17,377 features. Swagger spec public. viewer.etim-international.com class pages prerender and are enumerable via /sitemap.txt — 5,680 URLs.
• Conclusion: machine-readable today at zero cost and zero paperwork. No licence negotiation is needed to adopt ETIM as a spine.

The tile classes, with feature counts

EC011340 sits in group EG020056 (Masonry and tile material), published since ETIM 8.0, v5. Across all ~200 bSDD dictionaries it is the only real ceramic tile class — "porcelain stoneware" returns zero.

Flooring group EG020068, 13 classes: Parquet EC004040 18; Laminate EC004041 15; Solid wood EC004085 12; PVC flooring EC004931 14 (added only December 2024); Screed EC012273 17; Rubber EC012271 4; Plastic EC012272 3.

Soft flooring is a genuine taxonomy gap: no carpet, textile, linoleum or LVT class exists at all.

Feature codes that DO exist on EC011340

• Thickness EF020850
• Dimensions, nominal EF020848 / EF020849; production EF020855 / EF020856
• Finish EF020841 / EF020846, EF024897, EF020838
• Slip modelled twice — EF020842 (DIN 51097 A/B/C) and EF020843 (R9–R13)
• PEI equivalent EF020844
• Frost EF020845 — boolean only, not the tested class
• Rectified EF020839 / EF020840, EF022394
• Colour EF020851

That is a usable spec spine: slip in both common notations, a wear class, thickness, rectified edge, finish and colour.

Properties that are ABSENT

• Water absorption is absent from EC011340 — which breaks this document's showcase derivation, since ISO 13006 ties absorption to group and porcelain is definitionally <0.5%.
• Across all 17,377 ETIM features there are ZERO occurrences of: ISO 13006 / EN 14411 group, DCOF / ANSI A326.3, modulus of rupture, breaking strength, crazing resistance, stain resistance, thermal shock.
• It is a modelling gap, not a vocabulary limit — EC012349 Concrete tile does carry water absorption.
• Nothing relevant sits in the DYNAMIC pipeline, so there is no imminent fix.

Honest position: adopt ETIM as the spine, then extend it with water absorption, ISO 13006 group, breaking strength and DCOF. That is a defensible asset and unavoidable work.

The revealing detail: consumables beat the tile

Tile adhesive EC011707 = 42 features; tile grout EC011709 = 28; ceramic tile EC011340 = 28. Lighting is roughly four times deeper: downlight/spot/floodlight EC001744 = 118; ceiling/wall luminaire EC002892 = 115; street EC000062 = 85; emergency EC001957 = 68.

The standard grew out of the electrical and plumbing wholesale channel, and it shows. ETIM models what merchants stock and reorder, not what architects specify.

eCl@ss: better classes, no physics

• eCl@ss 16.0: 22-47 Tile/panel = 76 classes, split by body type and roughly matching ISO 13006 bands. 22-46 Flooring = 39 classes, including carpet, linoleum and cork — the exact classes ETIM lacks.
• But ADVANCED 16.0 tile classes expose only 7 properties, all REACH/SVHC/commercial. No technical aspect at all.

Verdict: ETIM wins on physics, eCl@ss on classes, neither on both.

ISO 13006 / EN 14411 / CPR

• ISO 13006:2018 is the real tile data model — A/B forming, Ev groups Ia–III, Annex N PEI scale, ISO 10545 test methods — but paid, prose, and not machine-readable. (2018, 2012)
• Water-absorption bands: BIa <0.5%, BIb 0.5–3%, BIIa 3–6%, BIIb 6–10%, BIII >10%. Porcelain is definitionally <0.5%, i.e. impervious.
• It also defines extruded vs dry-pressed, dimensional tolerances, surface quality, and the canonical terminology for glaze, engobed, rectified.
• EN 14411:2012 remains the CE / DoP basis. CPR (EU) 2024/3110 will not displace it for years — family by family, with standardisation requests in 2027/2028.
• No tile Digital Product Passport model exists or is commissioned.

PEI caution. PEI grades the wear of a glazed surface; unglazed and through-body porcelains receive no PEI rating, so an absent PEI is evidence of an unglazed or through-body product. Do not over-derive: sources treat water absorption, PEI and COF/slip as distinct complementary attributes, and slip rating is a measured test result that is not reliably derivable from finish or appearance.

Adoption: an enumerated absence, not a failed search

This is the most important finding in this section, because it was established by enumeration rather than by failing to find something.

• All 1,383 registered data suppliers in the Dutch 2BA datapool were enumerated. Absent: Tarkett, Gerflor, Interface, Desso, Unilin/Quick-Step, Kährs, Bolon, Rockfon, Armstrong, Uzin, Bostik, Forbo/Eurocol, Mapei, Ardex, Omnicol, Knauf, Saint-Gobain, Schlüter.
• Among the top 25 "Bouw"-sector data suppliers, not one is a tile or flooring manufacturer — they are bathroom, electrical, HVAC, fastener and tool companies.
• Forbo Flooring Systems: all 96 child sitemaps enumerated. Exactly ONE URL in the entire Forbo estate matches /etim/ — the Eurocol adhesives page.
• Uzin / Uzin Utz: zero ETIM URLs across full sitemap crawls.
• Mosa's only traceable ETIM data was applied downstream by a wholesaler, not published by Mosa. Villeroy & Boch's 2BA presence is its bathroom division. Marazzi is nowhere.
• Germany's 2022 building-materials launch plan: "Fliesen und Natursteine" was the one assortment group with no industry participants at all.

And yet permission has existed for years

• Flooring is officially in scope (this corrects an earlier "could not establish"): ETIM UK's Building Materials Sector includes "Walling, flooring & roofing materials, Structural steel, Civil infrastructure, Doors & windows, finishing & decoration products".
• The Builders Merchants Federation has been Sector Lead since 1 January 2020 — 1,020 members, GBP 51.6bn combined sales.
• ETIM Netherlands created a "Tegels" (tiles) commission after mid-2020.
• 11 of 18 national chapters run building materials; Belgium does not.

The problem is participation, not permission.

The double read — and why it matters more than the schema

Flattering: the normalisation work is genuinely undone. A free, machine-readable tile schema exists with 28 usable fields including R-value and a PEI equivalent, and not one tile brand has populated it.

Unflattering, and at least as plausible: adoption is absent because demand is absent. Five and a half years of permission, an organised merchant constituency of 1,020 companies, a purpose-built tiles commission, and a national launch that attracted zero tile participants. That is not a story about missing tooling.

More likely: tile selection is driven by appearance, price, availability and range, while compliance fields are supplied once, as a PDF datasheet or DoP, at specification time — not needed per-SKU in a catalogue.

If that holds it inverts this document's central split: the compliance-grade schema would have no commercial buyer.

Test before building: ask a tile merchant and an architect which fields they query per-SKU versus accept as a PDF. If the answer is "appearance and availability, plus a datasheet on request", the standards work is a cost, not a moat.

Exchange format and cross-taxonomy mapping

• ETIM xChange 1.1 is the current JSON master-data exchange standard, replacing ETIM's earlier BMEcat recommendation; a published xChange-to-BMEcat field mapping exists. BMEcat remains the paired XML format, with ETIM classification embedded, and a published ETIM BMEcat guideline.
• Sources note ETIM is increasingly the feature-data backbone behind BIM product objects, linking specify–procure–install.
• Licence trap on the mapping. NBS publishes a native Uniclass REST API (GET definitions/uniclass2015/{notation}/{depth}, JSON/XML, registration-gated, quarterly downloads) — but Uniclass is CC BY-ND. An ETIM-class-to-Uniclass-notation crosswalk is a derivative work: internal use is probably fine, publishing or selling the mapping likely is not. Get legal advice.
• bSDD gives mapping capability but not the dataset — it contains no OmniClass and no MasterFormat at all, so a mapping to the US taxonomies cannot be sourced from it. Cross-dictionary ClassRelation exists (IsEqualTo, IsSimilarTo, HasReference) and Molio's CCI shows full coverage is achievable, but Uniclass 2015 in bSDD carries zero outbound relations in sampling, sits at Preview status, isVerified: false, and was last touched August 2024.

Unverified — do not rely on

A claimed list of tile-chemistry ETIM adopters (Mapei, Ardex, Weber, Sopro, PCI) conflicts directly with the 2BA enumeration above. Treat as unverified.

ETIM AU/NZ

Announced 26 November 2021 by the Australian Industry Group, electrotechnical-only, and etim-aunz.com is still a parked NameBright page nearly five years later. Covered in full in the AU/NZ section below.