This is the second of three posts looking at publishing information from NBS so that it can be used by the wider project team. The first of these posts looked at exporting to Microsoft Word to improve the aesthetics of the published output. This post looks at the other end of the spectrum – publishing just the data regarding the systems and products that make up the built asset so that this data can then be transferred to other software applications such as FM systems.
When publishing data with interoperability in mind, it is essential that the data format is to an agreed public standard. Figure 1 below illustrates this in a simple non-construction-industry example. To take contact information from Google into Apple products there is a basic agreed data schema called vCard. 99.9% of the world needn’t know anything about this. But the software developers at Google and Apple do. They can then make great products and transfer information reasonably smoothly with the complexity hidden…