Friday, January 11, 2013

The IFC/COBie Report 2012 | Building Information Modelling (BIM) articles and information from NBS

OK, so we all know that the "I" in BIM is for information. There's this thing called COBie. It stands for Construction Owners Building information exchange. If that doesn't make sense to you, you just use a little plugin for Revit, export a bunch of schedules and it goes into a standardized spreadsheet with a bunch of tabs for floors, rooms, types of components and one big list of every component in the building.

Think of it as Columns Organized Building Items and Equipment. At it's most basic level, it's not a big deal. But, you have to start organizing the names of things and be consistent with stuff. That's is what creates a more interoperable exchange of information, models, ideas and helps the AECOFM industry work together more efficiently and effectively.

Owners, particularly, education, healthcare, government and other more sophisticated owners are starting to require this. Actually, I'd much rather give a thumb drive of PDFs of manuals and plans than boxes and boxes of paper. That's really what COBie is about in the big picture. Reduce manual paperwork and replace it with easy to find electronic organized information.

First thing you should do is read the stuff below and join the buildingSmart alliance. Its $75 and they are the ones creating the standards for these things. If you join, you get to vote on the standards. Otherwise it's 'do as your told' and you certainly don't want that.

Here's the link to join: http://www.buildingsmartalliance.org/index.php/join/individualmembers/

Source/Link:
The IFC/COBie Report 2012 | Building Information Modelling (BIM) articles and information from NBS {http://www.thenbs.com/topics/BIM/cobie/index.asp?utm_source=eNews-Weekly&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2013-01-10}

Download the report: http://www.thenbs.com/pdfs/IFC_COBie-Report-2012.pdf

The IFC/COBie Report 2012

The Government is committed to Building Information Modelling (BIM) and the use of open-standard data so that the construction industry can deliver greater value and be more efficient. The open-standard data format required for level-2 BIM is defined in the Construction Operations Building information exchange (COBie) data schema. COBie allows information about buildings to be organised, documented and shared in a standardised way. It is particularly helpful to those who come to manage a building.

We wanted to test whether the buildingSMART IFC file format was capable of supporting the creation of COBie datasets and we did this by running a trial with a number of Tier 1 contractors.