Specifiers' Properties Information Exchange (SPIE)
ORGANIZATION: USACE/NASA/OBO/NIBS/SCIP/CSI
Chair
Bill East
bill.east@us.army.mil
(217) 373-6710
problem
Despite staggering advances in computing technology in the last thirty years, the selection of building material, products, and equipment has remained virtually unchanged. The buildingSMART Alliance has begun a project that promises to forever change the way that building materials, products, and equipment are designed, discovered, specified, purchased, delivered, and installed.
objective
The objective is to create open schema used by manufacturers to export product data into a format that can be consumed by designers, specifiers, builders, owners, and operators. The objective of this project is not to create yet another electronic catalog. This project enhances efforts manufacturers have already made in the areas of e-marketplaces and standard bar codings.
scope
While there are many types of properties found on current catalog and product literature, this project focuses on properties needed for specification, discovery, selection, and verification of products against those specifications. To kick-start this effort the Specifications Consultants in Independent Practice (SCIP) and Construction Specification Institute (CSI) participated in the development of a very limited prototype of these templates. To move these templates from their current concept stage to associations and manufactures are invited to join the project and allow the buildingSMART alliance to help facilitate this effort in your market segment. The project will also coordinate input from manufacturers on existing schema for replacement parts, operations and maintenance manuals, troubleshooting guides, safety data sheets and other information defined in the COBie project. Additional projects to cover other cross-product domains such as sustainability are also likely to be facilitated through the SPie projects.
leadership
The advantage of working on such a project through the buildingSMART alliance is that the open standards developed through buildingSMART projects are being directly included in contracts by the largest federal construction agents in the U.S. including the Army, Corps of Engineers, NASA, and U.S. Department of State. The buildingSMART alliance allows you to directly work with representatives of these owners to ensure that business processes and software systems are streamlined to support the open standards we create together.
ownership
Manufacturers maintain full control over their data. Groups of manufacturers (preferably in the context of their related associations) will work with buildingSMART alliance to define the content of the schema. The buildingSMART alliance will define the format for the schema. The National Institute of Building Sciences will publish these schemas through the Whole Building Design Guide's Product Guide resource (link) free of charge. In addition, NIBS will work with participating firms to establish a discovery engine that will streamline discovery and purchase of your products.
the product guide
The current product templates are a work in progress. We need your help to ensure we have it right! You can look at the templates using the productguide™.
status
The team has drafted a project management plan to assist in communicating the recipe by which SPie projects can be accomplished. We are currently working with several associations on public demonstrations for the December 2010 NIBS Annual convention. These demonstrations will show how specifications can be used to automatically query manufacturers product data, build intelligent objects, and automatically delivery warranty and parts data to facility operators.
history
The SPie team completed its first public demonstration at the 2009 National Institute of Building (NIBS) Sciences Annual Meeting. Please see the SPie Dec 2009 Meeting Notes Page for more information from this meeting.
To follow-up on the success of the SPie December meeting NIBS hosted a two-day workshop in Washington, DC on 10-11 March 2010 to discuss SPie with manufactures and trade and manufacturing associations. This workshop demonstrated how product templates may be imported into design and specification software and them updated as products are selected for the project. The meeting described the process that may be used to create and deliver open standards across all building material, product, and equipment lines. Download presentations visit 2010 SPie Workshop.
