You’re all familiar with the bSa, right? The buildingSMART alliance is a council of the National Institute of Building Sciences (NIBS) and they put out some pretty interesting projects and information. Little things that you might have heard of like the National CAD Standard and the National BIM Standard, the Journal of Building Information Modeling… anyway, as I was getting some information from their web site, I noticed a link to the “buildingSMART alliance January 2013 Challenge”, where they challenged software vendors to prove how well their software communicates via open standards. I remembered seeing information about this a while back, but hadn't taken the time to dig into the details of the challenge and its results at the time. I took the opportunity to dig in a little deeper.
Note: The bottom of this post has a link direct to the very detailed reports and analysis of the Challenge.
It looks like a number of different companies participated in the Challenge – spanning different aspects of deliverables including HVACie, BPie, and COBie. The portion that most people following this blog probably care about is the COBie Design Challenge for Architectural Design and Coordinated Design.
The participants here were Autodesk, Bentley Systems and Graphisoft. Autodesk came out tops in the list – significantly ahead of the crowd as I read and interpret the results. In any competition like this, there will inevitably be various ways in which people and companies will look to interpret the results – both to try and pump up the positive and to reduce or invalidate the negative. That’s life and business and I get it.
...and I’m not going there with this post. Let’s take everything at face value – bSa is a good organization and I don’t see any deliberate intention to mislead people or to rig the system in any one direction.
Instead let’s focus on the positive and consider that as each software vendor interprets their individual results and leverages these results to better improve their product, what does this mean to us? A few thoughts and questions go through my mind:
- Overall I’m impressed at how much development has come into adherence to open standards. You can count me as a skeptic when it comes to full translation between closed and open standards – for a number of reasons. One reason would be a challenge in figuring out how a custom object behavior that is not part of the open standard get translated from one proprietary software to an open standard and then back into the same or a different proprietary software? The results I see here make me sit back and reconsider my skepticism. Nope. Still skeptical but I'll admit to wavering.
- There is a lot of information on the site that will take some time to fully absorb, but the future looks good for continuing to integrate and/or transfer information from BIM into Facilities Management.
- It would be interesting to see how well any of the COBie data could be edited and then brought back into design software. I suspect that custom systems integration (gee, we do that) would need to come into play to make this work effectively
- A little more in my own back yard, but I wonder what Autodesk’s results would be if using the new 2014 product line.
There is a lot more to read if you want to get deeper into the testing and results – follow the link below and enjoy!
http://www.nibs.org/?page=bsa_chall13
joe