Industry Shared Parameters are a list of parameters adopted by the foodservice industry to create a common standard of data fields for developing Revit families used by foodservice designers.
Revit system parameters are included in every Revit family and cannot be deleted; shared parameters are created by from a shared parameter file but they can be named whatever the designer chooses.
Here is a download link to the Industry Shared Parameters file
A shared parameter file is a list of parameter definitions that can be used to create project parameters or family parameters. By creating parameters from the same definition, Revit is able to link the parameters between projects and families and designers are then able to tag and schedule their Revit families.
But for this to be successful, all of the Revit families in a project must be created from the same shared parameters and the tags and schedules must also be created from the same shared parameters. No easy feat for an industry of over 200 manufacturers all creating their own Revit families.
But in 2011, a group of foodservice designers got together and created the FCSI shared parameters, a set of shared parameters specific to the foodservice industry and open to all foodservice designers regardless of FCSI affiliation. This allowed the creators of the equipment symbols to build from the same shared parameter list. By using these identical parameters, foodservice designers were then able to begin designing and using foodservice equipment Revit families from any manufacturer as long as those families were built with the FCSI shared parameter list.
The effect of the FCSI shared parameters and the standards that go with them has been extraordinary. The foodservice industry is a rare standards success story. Not only are the standards widely adopted, they serve as a guiding light for all foodservice designers moving into Revit. They began in the USA but in recent years they have been translated into 6 other languages and distributed across the world by a special global foodservice BIM task force.
Kitchautomation uses a similar set of shared parameters that we expanded to meet the needs of the global BIM community and we added a couple Energy Star parameters for our users doing LEED projects. We call our shared parameters the Industry Shared Parameters since they are compatible with the entire industry and are continuously being expanded. We also have a free tool called Parameter Mapper than can help users that are not using the industry shared parameters get back on track by converting their entire family database.
Industry Shared Parameters are 100% compatible with the FCSI shared parameters and most of them are identical.