Construction Informer

At first glance Building Information Modeling (BIM) appears to be a sea of churning waters and it’s no wonder. The International Alliance for Interoperability (IAI) brought together 19 countries in an effort to create a single building information model for the entire construction industry, according to this paper by Ian Howell and Bob Batcheler of Newforma. That work was successful and resulted in a draft ISO standard. But because there was a time that lapsed between the idea and the culmination of the IAI draft, others, namely software vendors, started creating their own versions of BIM.

Likewise additional efforts surfaced in other standards organizations like the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) and the American Standards Institute (ANSI), to name just two.

Today, Building Smart Alliance, associated with the National Institute of Building Sciences, has the National BIM Standard (NBIMS), of which Howell and Newforma are supporters along with 69 others including architects, the AIA, major home builders, designers, engineers and more. According to the Building Smart Alliance, IAI and other open source alliances have also signed on with the NBIMS. It is advanced by the supporters of the standard that it should spell out, among many other things, the ways and means for all the different software efforts to communicate with one another. The framers of NBIMS also don’t see any problems with the continuing growth of BIM solutions, writing:

Imperfect as it may be, the creation of a National Building Information Model Standard should do nothing to slow the explosive growth of BIMs in the industry, only make them more usable and sustainable and provide the software vendors supporting the facility industry a consistent target for their BIM development efforts.

So while the waters may be churning it appears NBIMS may offer the opportunity to get it all flowing in one direction. And that can surely help more of the promises of BIM to be realized.