BIM Level 3 UK Budget Announcement

In case like me at first you missed it, hidden away in the Digital Section of Chancellor George Osborne’s 2016 UK Budget was the following announcement:

The Digital Built Britain – Level 3 Building Information Modelling Strategic Plan set out the road map for the development of IFC to be the basis for the sharable structured data, this funding will ensure that the necessary work gets done.

This is fantastic news for the UK construction industry. The continued Government backing for the developments necessary to enable the digitisation of the industry ensure that we have the chance to build upon BIM Level 2, hit the targets set in the Construction 2025 Paper and keep one step ahead of the competition.

The BIM Technologies Alliance is a sub-committee of the UK Government’s BIM Strategy Group. Here the Government advise and give advice to the software vendors and the vendors collaborate to ensure that interoperability is enhanced. It is my privilege to have served on the BTA for the last few years. Government have made clear that at BIM Level 2 COBie and, as we head towards Level 3, IFC will be core to developments moving forward. On the back of this guidance Viewpoint have invested heavily in OpenBIM developments based around these core non-proprietary data formats. You can imagine how happy we are to have confirmation of the Governments continued investment in the development of structured Open date formats.

Viewpoint’s customers are just beginning to see the benefits of the investment in our new non-sequel COBie database. The industry faces the challenge of how we integrate data from multiple sources uploaded to the CDE