e-Bouw.org

Jakob Beetz has send his thesis “Facilitating distributed collaboration in the AEC/FM sector using Semantic Web Technologies” to the public today. I am very impressed by his work. His defence will take place on Juni 29th in Eindhoven. Hopefully this thesis will give Semantic Web technology in the AEC sector a boost.

De TU Eindhoven en TNO gaan op 25 en 26 juni aanstaande een BIM cursus geven.

De cursus moet een realistisch beeld geven van wat er op dit moment en in de (nabije) toekomst rond het onderwerp Building Information Modelling (BIM speelt).  Onderwerpen als de open source  BIMserver, IFC, IFD, IDM, COINS, VISI en andere afkortingen met hoofdletters zullen aan bod komen.

Volgens de site van TNO richt dag 1 (25 juni) zich op het strategisch niveau van deze onderwerpen. Op dag twee gaat de cursist praktisch aan de slag (hands on) met beschikbare tools om de in dag 1 behandelde stof toe te passen en uit te proberen in de eigen bedrijfssituatie. De cursus geeft daarmee in twee dagen een overzicht van nationale en internationale initiatieven die op korte en middellange termijn een verschil kunnen maken in de bedrijfsvoering van bedrijven in de (B&U en GWW) bouw.

Lees het complete bericht op de site van TNO.

Wijze woorden van Rob Roef over de aanstaande Bouw en ICT beurs vandaag in de Cobouw.

Rob Roef is enthousiast over de ontwikkelingen, maar veel klanten merken het volgens hem niet eens op, zij nemen het nieuws als vanzelfsprekend. Hun aandacht gaat uit naar het ‘bimmen’, de toepassing van een bouwwerkinformatiemodel. Ondertussen laten ze ontwikkelingen liggen, die in de dagelijkse praktijk van pas zouden komen.
“De afgelopen jaren is een aantal commerciële producten vereenzelvigd met bim”, stelt Roef. “Maar bim is geen product. Bim is een manier van werken. Het gaat om het delen van informatie, het hebben van een grote verzamelbak waaruit iedereen informatie kan vissen. Dat is niet hetzelfde als allemaal met dezelfde software werken, zoals vroeger.”

Zie hier de link met het complete artikel.

Movies always make a good impression. The ProClient-movie was nice, so let’s post another one:

The ProClient project closed its activities with the launch of a movie. Its a 6 minute movie and gives an idea of the ProClient-vision on client-interaction in the AEC industry.

See how the project has reached this vision (and the rest of the project) on www.proclient.org

View and/or download the movie in HD format on vimeo.com

Google Maps and Google Earth are getting together more and more. We already had a first glance at 3D in the browser by using the Google Earth plugin. But today Google takes it up a bit. Their navigation interface from Google Earth now comes to the browser through Google Maps. But most important: the street view function is better integrated in the interface. Finaly an end to the growing number of buttons in the upper right corner and a nice drag-and-drop button on the left. The streetview interface also got a better interface. No pop-up anymore, but nicely spread over the whole mapview. They also added some new streetview pictures and added proof that you can have cooler pictures when you know exactly when the photograper is comming around. Nice teaser: wedding proposal 2.0

Let’s hope that the API interface also got an update so our BIM models and GIS data can be viewed in streetview. That would be cool…. hell let’s just hack some stuff and just make it work without the API….

The 3D BIM concepts do not wait for IFC. When softwareapplications are not fast enough with supporting IFC, they turn to something else. The GIS world is one of the things they turn to, but realy cool low level tools are also gaining users…..

Watch out BIM world!

The GIS world is getting more and more interested in BIM. This movie is one of the issues where the GIS world is getting close to the BIM world. The main GIS developers at ESRI are also heading in the CAD direction.

The open source GIS world is realy big. They just have to figger out the 3D stuff (what the are doing!) and they are right in the middle of the BIM world. We welcome them!

A few months ago we posted an article on the logo of IAI on the BuildingSMART benelux website. We where told that the site will be renewed on short notice and the logo will be corrected on that new site. Today we received a link to the testversion of the new site.

The new site is based on the open source framework plone. The first thing we notice is the correct logo on the top . But most important of all: the site is completely valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional and it complies to the Guidelines for Web Content Accessibility (WCAG v1.0). This is a great example of interoperability. Our compliments to the guys at the TU/e for building this site! Let’s hope the put it ‘live’ soon. And let’s hope there will be an RSS feed available on the news section…

A recent post on the radar blog gives us a nice view on the work methods of ‘wikitecture’.  The article is very interesting, but one small part is very cool:

Many businesses are wrestling with the notion of “collaboration” and its possible benefits. Wikitecture reinforces some important points:
- Nothing is off limits: Collaboration can successfully occur in the production of almost anything (if architects can do it anyone can…).
- Diversity adds value: The more people from differing backgrounds the better the information pool to draw from.
- Structure drives behavior: Collaboration benefits from a clear structure to facilitate results. The wiki tree works in much the same way that Wikipedia does in setting specific rules up front that drive a successful outcome and allow many people to contribute harmoniously.

This shines the web 2.0 light on the AEC industry…. time to shift gear!

Read the full article here.