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CAD/GIS/BIM Integration through Standards

Why not? Because until now, implementing shared library systems for building information just hasn't been a practical goal except in limited situations. In our legacy technical and institutional environments:

• Integrating data from different types and brands of software has been difficult, requiring batch conversion of files, with significant manual intervention. Batch file conversion still dominates, though it is rapidly giving way to direct communication between networked software systems. This progress is enabled by the advent of a unified Internet and Web services infrastructure and open software interfaces and encodings that are cooperatively developed in open standards consortia and then widely implemented by vendors.
• Different data producers have used different and incompatible Building Information Models that define, for example the encoding of "window" or "water main". But that is changing as organizations such as the International Alliance for Interoperability (IAI) and its national partners work together in Facilities Information Council technical committees and other forums to develop "Industry Foundation Classes" (IFCs) and Building Information Model (BIM) standards. (BIM standards and IFCs are related, but BIM standards are not restricted to using IFCs as the data source.)

Figure: Organizations cooperating to achieve AEC/CAD/Geospatial interoperability


• Appropriate data sharing and archiving policies have not, in most cases, been put in place, because data coordination has simply not been a high priority for the organizations that need to be involved. This is true with geospatial data and it is true with facilities data and building data. Long term data management policies need to be agreed upon by different agencies' high level policy makers, who may not understand such issues or be accustomed to working together on them. Middle managers may drag their feet to protect their data fiefdoms, fearful of being "disintermediated" by modern information systems. People need to be assigned to do the work, which takes money out of already strained budgets. In sum, institutional barriers and inertia yield slowly to data sharing and system interoperability initiatives, even when it is obvious that data sharing and interoperability will save time, money and lives. But, as described below, old ways are yielding to financial drivers as business requirements make data sharing a requirement.

Growing Need and Opportunity to Share Building Information
Awareness of the costs of "stovepiped" (isolated by technical, semantic or institutional barriers) and lost data is growing within all of the building and facilities professions.

Security and emergency response requirements are doing a lot to fuel this growth in awareness. In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the U.S., the December 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, the October 2005 Pakistan Earthquake and other recent disasters, almost every local government has been reviewing its emergency response and disaster response plans. Many city councils and managers are creating policies, for example, that give fire departments access to online CAD drawings of building interiors.

One case of this is the Construction and real estate network (CORNET), an initiative of the Ministry of National Development, Singapore, which aims to provide IT support to the construction industry for the whole life cycle of the building. Automated building code compliance checking is one of its objectives.

Private sector companies are realizing how interoperability helps them. Seamless integration of building data and geospatial data helps owners, buyers and mortgage institutions define the value of the buildings. It helps with design visualization and coordination, space report and program reconciliation, owner/tenant communication, construction sequencing, energy simulation, traffic/egress simulation, risk analysis, and facility management. Just as Internet-based supply chain management has revolutionized manufacturing, standards-based building information models – integrated with related geospatial data models -- are poised to revolutionize the building and facilities industries.


Figure: Many activities benefit from geospatial, CAD and other kinds of facilities information gathered at all stages in the life cycle of a building or other structure.

Like many other industries, the construction industry is becoming more efficient through globalization and the outsourcing of professional services. New Indian and Chinese centers for professional service outsourcing are working with project teams and team members in other countries. As quoted in a study titled "Revolution and Achievement: New Practice and Business Models Emerge in Study of Architecture, Design, and Real Estate" by Greenway Consulting (www.greenwayconsulting.com), the San Francisco office of Flack + Kurtz Inc., an international consulting engineering firm, said, “When we are working overseas we normally take the project through design and then have the local engineers complete construction documents with our supervision so that they can provide their knowledge of all the local codes, standards and construction practices.” Participants in the survey described in this study often mentioned technology as a tool that facilitates working across the globe.

Both commercial activities – such as outsourcing -- and disaster response activities involve workflows, that is, the flow of activities and interactions in a project. Much of this "flow" is information flow. Both corporations and agencies seek to engineer more efficient workflows that take full advantage of information technology. Where workflows involve the cooperation of multiple participants in independent organizations, working on multiple tasks, the only reasonable approach is to agree on an open architecture and an interoperable software environment. Having once established a comprehensive set of open, consensus-derived Information Technology standards, one step can flow smoothly into the next and all project components and documents can be integrated to enable workflows that can be either planned or ad hoc.