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