BIM Workflows: Data Management - Next Gen?

OBD has over the course of its thirty-year history evolved to incorporate three different BIM data management systems.

  1. Family & Parts
  2. Datagroup System
  3. Items (via Mstn)

V8i: F&P seems to be relegated to handling symbology with the DGS being the main tool for attaching so-called instance data to objects.

CE: the direction of travel seems to be going towards adopting the Mstn platform-wide Items EC framework. Confusingly, a lot of Engineering Component (EC) stuff is also based on xml formating. Bentley Map and OpenPlant being early users of the technology. Closer to home, Bentley Facilities Planner also uses Items schema tools. Even Mstn has a lot of schema-based stuff built-in and fairly easy to access via Named Expressions and the Items tools.

Advantages:

  1. Deals with relationships and heirachies: locational
  2. Supports expressions, lookups and queries
  3. Commonality with other tools: It would be great to be able to leverage associated tools like OpenPlant's Class Editor to generate object-oriented hierarchial / IFC-style data, or its Excel sheet to-Catalog tools or Consistency Manager. Or OpenRoad's Asset Manager which can actually use Excel spreadsheets directly (much more approachable than the current Notepad++ situation with OBD). BRCM?

Solving a lot of the longstanding complaints against OBD: too many fragmented 'priority-build' and parallel tools that have never been fully developed or tested. Too much text-based fiddling. Lack of R*vit-style propagation / lookup smarts etc look like they are now within reach...?

Disadvantages:

  1. Complexity: the straight-forward unlinked, everything must be manually updated, flat-table way of working has a lot of appeal.
  2. Better the devil you know? Spending enough on training already....
  • Hi,

    I haven't heard of any plans regarding combining the data verticals into one single schema as of now.

    However, it would be interesting to see what views others have regarding this.

    Regards,

    Tathagata

  • Yes, it would...

    An example of how providing a lookup / expression functionality in the Datagroup system would be useful. Please note that hardcoding a few properties (Enhancement 239032) is not really useful in the long run.

  • Hi,

    When I started working with OBD (and its predessors) it was a very hard to understand the difference between DataGroup System and Dataset Explorer. Why two different systems?

    But the most difficult thing is the bad GUI of both. DataGroup Sytem with its Catalog Editor or Dataset Explorer of F&P. This menus are as old as this systems are and is painful in using it.

    And now a third system with Items? How should you tell and learn new users to use three different systems for jsut for noen graphical informations. And with my first tests I wasn't able to export Items to IFC.

    On the other hand I with beginning of this year I started learing OpenPlant and the first positive impression was that with OpenPlant Administrator you get modern Tool for set up your system and configuration.

    So my wish for OBD to Bentley is, create one system for using none graphical information and create a modern GUI like lOpenPlant Administrator for setting up your systems and configurations.

    Regards,

    Christian

  • Hi Christian,

    There is an ongoing discussion about a configuration management utility, we obviously need to make configuration simpler to use. That would be a unified tool for all MicroStation based Open applications.

    Modernizing the family/part and DataGroup systems would be a separate challenge. There is another discussion under way about Dataset management and updating.

    We cannot report anything more definite at this point, but are aware of the needs.

    Regards

    Marc