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....