Grow and Change at Different Rates
March 14 2008 | In BuildingIn “A Request for Technology In Support of an AECOO (Architecture, Engineering, Construction, Owner and Operator) Testbed, the buildingSMART alliance and Open Geospatial Consortium OGC wonder:
“We envision an idea around BIM as not simply a collection of files, or objects, but rather a collection of evolving business components and building systems, which grow and change at different rates according to project phase and building requirements. Based on our work we would like your thoughts about BIM instances and how they might be employed interoperably over the timelines for design, construction and operation.”
[270] The Clock of the Long Now by Stewart Brand sorts civilization into six layers that change at different rates over time. See The New Vernacular at LinuxJournal.
[187] Different layers of the rock are weathered at different rates, by MrSciGuy Phil Medina.
[630] As memes propagate over the Internet, they seep into different domains at different rates, at RealMeme.com
Even though network interoperability is a new problem, tracking project phases and building requirements is an old problem. According to Brian Bowen at the Construction History Society “…changes in construction take place ever so slowly and not necessarily at the same pace everywhere. So precise timelines are impossible to plot.”
[208] Tertiary structure of Thermus SSU rRNA (similar to 12S mitochondrial RNA), by Wuyts et al. See Palaeos Vertabrates.
Plotting timelines for design, construction and operation, starting from when building processes began, would include the following, also based on comments from Brian Bowen at Georgia Tech:
“Contracts: There have been construction contracts from the earliest of times. The Greeks inscribed them in stone. Up until the second half of the 19th century, contracts were of great simplicity, naming the parties, outlining the scope of work, basis of payment, time for completion, commitment to the work (i.e. show up) and some form of guarantee or assurance (surety) that the work will be completed.
Basis of Payment: There were three choices - time & material, fixed lump-sum, or unit prices. The latter, usually known as measure & value, became the favored method in England from medieval times, carried over to colonial America up to the time that general contracting became the norm.
Trade Contracting: Masons tended to predominate in Europe, carpenters in America.
General Contracting: There is plenty of evidence of masons or carpenters taking fixed price contracts as early as the 17th century for small and simple buildings like housing. The application of General Contracting to more substantial work began in the periods noted above and it took a generation or two for the system to fully take hold. This was driven by facilities becoming more complex and elaborate. And the labor unions needed taming.”
The Taming of Bucephalus, by Andre Castaigne at WikiCommons.
Construction of the semantic world does not yet have general contractors or labor unions to tame or benefit from.
Looking back to the original problem posed by buildingSMART and OGC to… envision an idea around BIM as not simply a collection of files, or objects, but rather a collection of evolving business components and building systems, which grow and change at different rates according to project phase and building requirements. Based on our work we would like your thoughts about BIM instances and how they might be employed interoperably over the timelines for design, construction and operation. We seek your ideas and information architectural approaches for such a concept.
A timeline of all building business components and systems over extremely long periods of time would be sketchy in the background with only slow changes. Today, the timeline and quantity of BIM instances is rapidly changing and growing. Not only does design and financial information need to be captured and distributed, so does location in several regards:
Geographically;
As the building footprint sits within the property line even if the footprint is right up against the property line but its own line;
Hong Kong Central, locally known as 香港
The locations of goods being manufactured in factories;
Confirmed delivery on site;
Reflection of sending and receiving in the schedule of values used as a basis for payment;
Location of installed products from factories to buildings around the world;
Tracking buildings and products for performance, warranty expirations and other operations and maintenance tasks that could not be tracked on large scales before.
The buildingSMART/OGC collection of evolving business components and timeline might be able to reapply the old idea of measure and value to new semantic space using all the activities going on in physical space as a model. Alternatively, if new fangled schedules of values are datasets purely in semantic space ~ there are no physical constraints and the topology can be manipulated. Examples of growth and change at different rates can be found in the maps of science in Places & Spaces curated by Katy Borner at Indiana University.
The Chronic Poverty Centre, You are not here: A world poverty map, 2004
Zones of Invention - Patterns of Patents, by Ingo Gunther
STATEMENT FROM THE ARTIST, INGO GUNTHER: “WORLDPROCESSOR: Zones of Invention — Patterns of Patents” by Ingo Gunther, New York, NY The Worldprocessor-globe based image plots the total amount of patents granted worldwide, beginning in 1883 with just under 50,000, and continuing to 2002 on a rapid climb towards 1 million, the x-y parameters of the annually shifting amount of total patents granted worldwide is plotted around a globe by a line graph. Though other cartographically related information distorts as a result, by preserving the plotted line as an uninterrupted constant, an overview of this rapid escalation is derived through the reconstitution of four different perspectives into a single image. Geographic regions where countries offer environments conducive to fostering innovation are represented by topology. Additionally, nations where residents are granted an average of 500 or more U.S. patents per year are called out in red by their respective averages in the years after 2000. This research is supported by the National Science Foundation (under grant IIS 02-38261) and by Indiana University. (Date of Image: December 2005).