On 27 April 2010 CPIC chaired a workshop for an invited audience to discuss the current situation in the industry with regard to building information modelling.

Mervyn Richards opened the workshop, presenting a paper asking What do you think BIM is?. A keynote paper was presented by Mark Bew, followed my presentations by David Throssel, Phil Jackson and Steve Jolley.

The papers and notes of the discussion that followed can be found here.

Following presentations from Paul Oakley, John Gelder and Joe Martin draft proposals will be prepared for discussion at the next meeting to be held at the ICE.

It is with great sadness that we heard of the untimely death of Jeff Wix, last Saturday. Jeff was a one off and he will leave a very big hole throughout the international scene. His knowledge and enthusiasm is irreplaceable.

The workshops provided an opportunity for representatives from a number of organisations to share their practice and knowledge in the light of current developments – particularly CAD software and object modelling. There is an acceptance that there needs to be a common method of classifying information and that Uniclass is a good start.

The first tables of Uniclass are easily usable to describe the facility to be provided and the entities and spaces within these facilities. The tables which are being used by CAD software developers are tables G and L.

The group agreed that it would be easier to classify projects such as railways and highways, if the elements for construction were combined into one table – G – rather than being split between tables G and H. An exercise has been carried out to generate this new table.

As a result of this exercise the group has identified the need to develop other tables, such as tables J and K to help to relate the elements in table G to the products in table L.

A further meeting is to be arranged to discuss this.