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This paper describes the research and development of the Dutch national standard for information levels of BIM. The US-developed "Levels of Development" (LOD) have become increasingly popular in the Netherlands. However, more and more projects felt the need to develop an additional LOD250 and LDO350. It became clear that the Dutch design-and-engineering process needed different information levels to operate effectively. During an R&D project that involved 9 Dutch SME companies research was done focused on the levels needed in the Dutch AEC industry. During this project, the team also looked at several other information levels - the Danish, the Australian, and the UK RIBA information and the LOD concept in CityGML. The project team came up with 7 information levels. A matrix was developed on which construction objects were linked to the 7 levels. Several companies in different BIM projects tested this matrix in practice. Results from this test were concluded in a guideline for effective use of the information levels and the matrix. This paper will describe the test results and the resulting recommendations for practical use of the standard in the Netherlands. Furthermore, an experiment was conducted to automatically identify the detail of the geometry of an IFC model. This was done by analyzing several characteristics like number of objects per m, and number of geometrical triangles per object. The results of this geometrical test are also added in the paper. © ASCE 2014.