Cannon Design Blog

With so much happening related to BIM and Revit, it is often hard to highlight stories that may seem like background noise to large projects: how we manage project data, the “I” in BIM, etc. And, it is equally hard to promote the important advances in global efforts to both standardize and improve information exchanges. Behind the scenes as part of the buildingSMART Alliance, AECO professionals and government representatives are working on how we standardize the way we organize data in our industry to promote exchange and interoperability across projects and time.  Real-world examples of these efforts include the Construction Operations and Building Information Exchange, or COBie.  Or, OmniClass, which is used by the VA in conjunction with their VA-SEPS programming information.  Both are standards that we are beginning to utilize in our practice of BIM in order to meet the requirements of BIM deliverables to government clients, such as the VA.

We recently highlighted the activities of the National BIM Standards (NBIMS) Practice Committee in this blog post where Deb MacPherson, from our DC office, discusses her involvement with the NBIMS Technical Committee. Deb is invested in the development of new data standards and explains that, “the main reasons I’ve been involved with NBIMS are to enable interoperability and improve data quality, especially during exchanges.”

As we continue to evolve our practice of building information modeling, leveraging this information from a project database will become not only a necessity for managing compliance and consistency, but as the team is doing with CodeBook on CHUM, this will become a common part of our practice. And, I am pleased to highlight the CHUM team’s commitment to managing the data on the project with CodeBook, despite the daunting scale of the project.

CDV Systems, Inc., our technical consultant for BIM integration with CodeBook, said it better than I when they announced: “CodeBook Deployed on Canadian Super-Hospital.” This is no small feat, and special acknowledgement must go to both Jill Bergman and Jen Cayton for their tireless commitment and enthusiasm for the way CodeBook allows us to manage the “I” in BIM on such a very large information-rich database like CHUM. Jill explains why CodeBook helps the team manage the project by saying that, “CodeBook augments the team’s BIM tools and leverages the database across the project, for equipment schedules and room data management into the design process. Managing all of the room types and repetitive data across this large project, we needed an application that would help us validate the model outputs, automating the review, and ensuring compliance with the hospital’s emerging standard specifications for each type of space, without having to manually count or track anything. We also know our client will use this database for facility management after we deliver this project.”

You can download the full CodeBook press release here (PDF).

Elizabeth Chodosh - 14 Feb 2012

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