Chapter 3 of the BIM Handbook discusses the importance of Interoperability, which is the the interaction of file types with different programs. With just a quick look through the chapter you can see how many different file types there are. Considering how much information one file has with it it is very important to make sure that file in its entirety can be transferred between one program and another. This may seem like a simple task at first, but it is anything but.
One of the reasons that file conversion is not as easy as it sounds it because there are so many different standards by which different companies make their products. David Morrison talks in his blog why different companies either usually have good interoperability or poor interoperability, and it comes down to, of course, money. But I do not think this is the only reason for such diversity. As software becomes more and more powerful, the things it can do grows exponentially. When the first CAD softwares were created there were typically used just for simple drawings, however now a CAD drawing is so much more than just lines, often having data such as material properties and other information. This leads to different professions needing different standards for their CAD drawings to contain the information they need. This comic wonderfully displays why there are so many file types.
Despite the shear number of file types and the problems that can arise from trying to make them accessible, there are several foundations and committees that have worked and are still working on trying to make the industry completely interoperable. This is a task worth working towards. I was in Nathan's group on the GIS project he talks about and the different file transfers required were ridiculous. For one file of about 700kb, it needed to be converted in one program so that it could be imported into another program. This process would take the 700kb file and make it into about seven 1mb files that when more than 1 was opened at a time would crash the program. Its problems like this that make interoperability a dream of every engineer and architect and any one else who uses these types of files across different software.
I think Autodesk has a good approach with its Revit line of products because it has a separate program for architectural design, structural design, and mechanical design, however all of these programs work off the same base so that they can all be combined easily. This is the kind of interoperability that the industry as a whole needs to achieve.
One of the reasons that file conversion is not as easy as it sounds it because there are so many different standards by which different companies make their products. David Morrison talks in his blog why different companies either usually have good interoperability or poor interoperability, and it comes down to, of course, money. But I do not think this is the only reason for such diversity. As software becomes more and more powerful, the things it can do grows exponentially. When the first CAD softwares were created there were typically used just for simple drawings, however now a CAD drawing is so much more than just lines, often having data such as material properties and other information. This leads to different professions needing different standards for their CAD drawings to contain the information they need. This comic wonderfully displays why there are so many file types.
Despite the shear number of file types and the problems that can arise from trying to make them accessible, there are several foundations and committees that have worked and are still working on trying to make the industry completely interoperable. This is a task worth working towards. I was in Nathan's group on the GIS project he talks about and the different file transfers required were ridiculous. For one file of about 700kb, it needed to be converted in one program so that it could be imported into another program. This process would take the 700kb file and make it into about seven 1mb files that when more than 1 was opened at a time would crash the program. Its problems like this that make interoperability a dream of every engineer and architect and any one else who uses these types of files across different software.
I think Autodesk has a good approach with its Revit line of products because it has a separate program for architectural design, structural design, and mechanical design, however all of these programs work off the same base so that they can all be combined easily. This is the kind of interoperability that the industry as a whole needs to achieve.
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