Current Filter: Cad>>>>>>

   

I first used it at an Xplor Conference sometime during the '80s, when I was Research Director on printers at a well-known research company, back when line and band printers were still in vogue and laser printing was just starting to make headway.

The subject matter of the conference, held at a converted nunnery somewhere to the East of Eindhoven in The Netherlands, was the 'paperless office', and various prognostications were made which still haven't really come to fruition, despite the huge advances in digital and mobile technology.

We're getting close, but printer manufacturers still appear to have a steady market, and despite the wealth of information you can get on the Internet, chances are that you are still holding and reading this magazine (well, unless you’re reading the online version of course!).

The aforementioned 'Information' was just a smidgeon compared to the torrent of data that comes our way every day, so much so that we are adept at discarding most of it through filters on our browsers, and we get impatient if a page takes more than a few seconds to download.

We are adding to that information ourselves daily in the construction industry, especially when we accumulate the data we need to fill our BIM obligations. The trouble here is that the vast amount of it is probably unnecessary, but it is easier to pile in everything we can, then take out what we need, than to devise a routine to filter out the elements that will be superfluous when we are adding components and other details.

We are fortunate in that the performance, storage levels and communications bandwidths of today's systems can make light work of most data needs, but we then butt up against the human element in the system. What do we do with all that information? We know that there is a lot of valuable information tucked away in there somewhere, but how do we identify and access it? We know what we've got, but if we pass it on down the line, can the next person use it?

Hence the development of COBie, which takes the structured data from the design and construction stages of a project and renders it in a format that would be more familiar to facility managers and building maintenance operators. For which, much thanks, but we still have a mass of data lying there which could be used elsewhere.

The mass of files, drawings and documents we have created, metalinks we have established and standards we have referenced contain much more than just design and component data. They contain information about tenders and contracts, real-time financial information, technical maintenance manuals and much more.

What is now required is the means to make sense of all that information, instead of just providing a simple search, read, update and disseminate solution - the basis of many file and document management systems currently available.

The article on CONJECT in this issue looks at the learning curve the company went through before they decided that their role lay not just in managing the files and documents in their repositories, but in making that information work for the company. In short, mastering the information overload instead of becoming a slave to it.

by David Chadwick