What is BIM Data Wrangling?
Data Wrangling is the process of cleaning, organizing, structuring, and enriching the raw data to make it more useful for analysis and visualization purposes. Bim data wrangling does this especially for BIM (Building Information Model) models.
This is what Simplebim® does. The goal is to turn raw BIM data into easy-to-use information and actionable insights for every construction professional on daily basis.
Don’t be scared. It is not as difficult it might sound like. This is a huge opportunity. And you can start with something very simple like trimming the model. And continue from there to comprehensive data wrangling like some of our construction company customers, which enriches the data in various ways. Typically you start with something simple and then progress in steps to more advanced operations. Simplebim scales with your needs.
Why Do You Need Simplebim for Data Wrangling?
There are generic data wrangling, data munging, data transformation, data cleaning, data cleansing or data processing platforms out there. (What ever you want to call it). So why do you need Simplebim?
Very simply because BIM has unique qualities and features, which the generic tools cannot handle. For example all the 3D geometry-based analysis, quantity take-off, and classifications, like defining the locations. But also very specific data structures and connections between the building element objects, which cannot be found and handled in a generic way.
Why Do Uou Need Data Wrangling in the First Place?
First. Data in its raw form is rarely useful to any organization. This applies to all digital data in all industries, but especially to BIM data. In construction, we are still developing our skills compared to many other industries. BIM data wrangling makes BIM data usable and valuable.
Second. According to some studies, data professionals spend almost 80% of their time wrangling the data, leaving a only 20% for actual use. With BIM the ratio is probably even worse at the moment, because of the inefficient workflows and a lot of manual work. So, data wrangling is an important task in any digital data processing and usage. The better you are, and the more efficiently you can do it, the more value you produce. Simplebim’s BIM data wrangling tools allows you to excel in all of this.
Benefits of BIM Data Wrangling
- Data wrangling helps to improve data usability, because it turns data into a compatible format for the downstream applications and usage from multiple different data sources (different design disciplines, model author tools, companies and so on).
- The users can use ready-made views and reports, which work for every model, every model update and in every project.
- Consistent and enriched data enables automate data-flow and automated data analysis and simulation, because the data is always the same.
- Standard enriched data can be automatically connected to other data sources. This again enables game changing, comprehensive insights to data.
- Data wrangling scales the data usage. Because of the automation, the data is available with reasonable skills, resources, cost, and always on time. Enriching and connecting the BIM data to other data sources enable large number of use cases, and thus large number of user for the data.
- Since large volume can be consistently processed, BIM data wrangling enables large scale big picture analysis of building data with modern tools, even machine learning and AI. Not just within a single project, but to the whole project/asset portfolio.
BIM Data Wrangling Use Cases
Bim data wrangling can and should be used any time you try to use open BIM (IFC) model data.
This can be as simple as removing extra objects from other design discipline’s model before importing it to your model author tool as basis for your work. For example structural engineer probably only needs load bearing objects from architectural model. Not the furniture or spaces and other details. Or an architect only need the foundation from structural model.
Or you could prepare your model for energy analysis software.
Or as a construction company or owner, you could process models from all the disciplines in various of ways. Standardizing and normalizing them. Classifying. Enriching. Calculating quantities. Defining locations. And then use the enriched data in a scalable and updatable way in cost estimation, production planning, scheduling, procurement, tendering, logistics, onsite management, and more…
Check out how our customers have used Simplebim in amazing projects from our main website: Case Studies.
BIM Data Wrangling Steps
Data wrangling typically has six steps: Discovering, Structuring, Cleaning, Enriching, Validating, and Publishing data.
In Simplebim for BIM data wrangling we have identified roughly 10 steps: importing the data, exploring it, cleaning, standardizing and normalizing the data, validation data, classifying the building elements, enriching the data in different ways, calculating quantities based on the geometry, defining locations and publishing the IFC models and data.
Revolutionize BIM Data Usage
Digital data in construction is the same as in any other industry. So far we, as an industry, have been lacking behind in digital data usage. One of the major issues to solve is to manage the data in scalable way. Simplebim introduces next generation BIM data wrangling tools, to do just that.
The goal is to turn raw BIM data into easy-to-use information and actionable insights for every construction professional on daily basis. The time and tools are here. What are we still waiting for?