Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Interoperability in the Future

As was discussed last week, interoperability is a huge issue in the use of different BIM software. It cause numerous problems and as Elda points out, costs billions of dollars every year. Interoperability is a problem that will only persist and grow into more of a headache as new technology constantly keeps pushing what can be done in drawings. If new software with new capabilities grows faster than the capabilities of interoperability, the task of working these drawings will become almost as daunting as building the building itself.

Hopefully that will not happen. Hopefully in the future, before it gets too out of hand, the major companies in the field will take steps towards making their software play more friendly with everything else, or, similar to what Mitchell said, someone will create a software dedicated just to handling all of the different file types, a program to take in any file type and, with minimal losses, output it as any other file type. If these things come to fruition, the hassle of interoperability could quickly become a thing of the past.

Sadly, and frustratingly, this is unlikely to happen. Competition in the market will likely prevent the large companies for playing nice together, and the chance of one mega-program capable of what I described would probably not work nearly as well as it would have to to really make a difference. This is very frustrating as interoperability seems like an issue that should be able to be overcome, however, it is likely that it will never be fixed in a truly sufficient way.

Idealist me would like to believe that in five years, our technology is powerful enough that file exchange is nothing more than a few clicks. Realist me thinks this is not going to happen that soon, if ever.

Sources:
BIM Handbook: A Guide to Building Information Modeling for Owners, Managers, Designers, Engineers, and Contractors

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