661.469.018 KB
The successful delivery of an ICDD container.
In the article, AEC Information Containers as Project APIs, Manos Argyris explained the fundamentals of the ISO21597, the so-called ICDD and why we think of it as a great idea. Widely discussed as a possible structure for any CDE, this standard was made to hand over project data or exchange files of a heterogeneous nature in an open and stable container format. For sure, you are familiar with that tiny logo, right? Yup, it's a ZIP.
The standard says: A container is a file that shall have an extension ".icdd" and shall comply with ISO/IEC 21320–1, also known as ZIP64.
Information deliveries are often a combination of drawings, information models, text documents, spreadsheets, photos, videos, audio files, etc. In this case, many scans and point clouds came on top. And while we have all metadata datasets in our system, it is pretty hard to hand this over to the client, that might have another way of handling it. So we have now put all those specific relationships between information elements in those separate documents using links because we believe it will contribute significantly to the value of information delivery.
But projects can go big, right? The 661469018KB from the title is the file size of a project we successfully delivered last week. Whoever is now calculating it is 660GB! And it is a ZIP; before zipping, it was around 8TB!
How to send 660GB?
It has a whole archive back to the 60'it has all models, all point clouds the model was made of, and it has all documents produced from the models too. So, all in all, we have 2338 documents.
We created an ICDD container that, when represented as an RDF graph (index & links), is composed of 29762 unique entities, 37897 literal values and 147795 triples. Well, that is a Christmas package!
Learnings
Now three things we learned from this.
- It is possible to create colossal zip files (I didn't know this was really going to work, and I have never seen such a big ZIP file ever before… let's make a challenge as the ISO standard is out there for just a year, is this the most giant ICDD container ever been produced so far?
- The ICDD idea works great, and we could efficiently deliver not only a bunch of unrelated files but all the relations between them too. In the beginning, we had set up a DMS (Document management system) to serve the client and recommended just taking the whole system to have access to all the files. Now we have delivered even greater value as the ICDD is not only to deliver, store and archive documents, but it can also be continued throughout the projects entire lifecycle.
- Structure, packing worked out great… Sending not so much. First, we couldn't upload the big point cloud files to the DMS; it just stopped after a couple of gigas. Then the client couldn't download; either Sharepoint or a download platform didn't work. These things also just stopped after some time. Next, we wanted to set up FTP and split it into parts, but you know that it can be tricky to put it back together again. And by that time, Post finally had arrived. Our Plan B was putting it on a Harddrive and sending it as a package, and this was finally faster than figuring out a Download solution.
We think that the ICDD container will bring great benefits and will increase the value of information delivery, and we are proud to deliver one of the first biggest containers we have heard of so far. Only sending hard drives feels so 90`, that's is almost like using good old kings carrier pigeons… :-(
But that's a thing we will solve next year. Merry Christmas and happy new year to all our readers, friends, and colleagues!
