Nearly everyone involved in the construction industry are using templates in some form or other be they a creator or consumer of digital information. In BIM, the common understanding for the use of templates is in the context of components from generic design elements holding specification performance requirements to products with actual performance data. Templates…

Why is COBie (Construction Operation Building Information Exchange) relevant to Building Owners: It can take 6 to 12 months before a Building Owners Facility Management teams to populate numerous systems with data to manage a new building. Despite the best intentions of the construction delivery team the paper/digital documents of Operations and Maintenance are invariably…

Why is SPie (Specifiers Properties Information Exchange) relevant to Product Manufacturers: The prime driver for manufacturers is to sell products. Many manufacturers marketing under the banner of BIM are providing geometry model versions of their products with all the data attached. Manufacturers are being encouraged to do this in the expectation that specifiers will use…

It’s getting closer but here is a link to our working version of the Product Library application. In order to give folks an insight to how it is progressing I have made a handful of suppliers and products publicly viewable. There is a more in depth explanation of the application and how it is intended to…

1: Cobie can be produced from a single 3D Building Geometry model No it can’t because there isn’t a Geometry BIM system that can input and store all the data so how can it possibly export it! 2: You can only produce Cobie from BIM Geometry systems. No you can build Cobie data from schedules…

The Building SMART Data Dictionary is built to be accessed with API’s (application programming Interface) and this can be achieved from any internet enabled programming environment. In the template library we implemented a call to retrieve the template description based on the templates IFCObject name. In this example I get the return data in XML…

This is an example of how I hack data from one structure to another and in this example it’s COBie Attributes which seems to cause people the most problems. Why do it this way? Well the reality is the IFC data model is a great data model and most people have their existing data in…

I have always worn a wrist watch and I’ve always liked drawing even through my working life has been dominated by things digital. When my Timex explorer watch compass needle got stuck on the 10 minute notch, everything became 10 past, it was “Time” for a new something. I was at a meeting some weeks…

The BIM show live 2015 in Manchester, UK during a question and answer session with James Pellatt from Great Portland Estate clapped at an answer to a question about the use of COBie on the Residential Project in the presentation. James Pellatt (Head of Projects at GPE) said “COBie was irrelevant”. With James Pellatt on…