The L-CDE project
Sometimes easy things are hard to understand. Sometimes while looking at things, you will say: Why do we keep doing it this way? There are different ways which are much better… So why?
If we had every information, it would be easy to decide and move on. But we don't. It is hard and exhausting to gain info and complicated to figure out which is important or just advertising promises.
In the following weeks, we will describe the concepts and technology of something we are working on for years in a series of small articles. And we believe everyone in the AEC industry should know about it. Because every day, we wonder why so little is known about this amazing technology that works perfectly fine in other domains and for sure will be beneficial to our industry. We speak of it as the LINKED Common Data Environment.
A CDE (Common Data Environment) is one of the central elements in the digitalisation of the construction industry for planning, construction and operations. A “Linked” CDE is based on the idea of applying developments from the Linked Data movement, the power of graph databases and the flexibility of semantic web technologies to a CDE. Thus to provide better information, empower better decisions and unlock new potentials by making AEC data compatible with cutting-edge advancements in Knowledge Graphs and AI.
Just a sneak preview: Linked open data is a smart way to use the existing instead of inventing things repeatedly. Now think of your last construction project? Yeah… right!
Graph databases are crazy fast and allow a more flexible architecture because the data defines the architecture of the data model… ok, keeping it simple: The world of construction is TOO COMPLEX to fill it in rows and columns.
Semantic Web covers many things, like a real query language to ask for stuff independent of where or how it is stored. (based on real industry standards that still will work in a few years from now) Wouldnt that come in handy?
Today, public and private portfolio owners must make good use of their properties to meet the market's demands. At the same time, real estate owners today have to manage large amounts of data, react quickly to changes, use different sources (such as SAP, BIM, GIS, ERP), keep track of things and, above all, make good decisions.
During construction, things change constantly, and back coupling in such a complex thing as a construction site always breaks our schedules to pieces. So again, we need to adjust, keep track of things and make good decisions.
Planning is bargaining and cooperation; many things need to be designed, coordinated, adjusted and communicated. And looking at projects going horrible wrong: Yes! We need to keep track of things and definitely need to make better decisions.
It is not technical details that drive us today, but rather the daily operational and strategic issues. Information is needed to answer all the questions that an organisation asks itself every day. Useful, coherent, up-to-date information that is easily accessible to the decision-maker. So for the moment, we could say:
Thesis 1: All operational and strategic considerations need information to make the right decisions.
Thesis 2: This information is composed of various data sources (internal and external), from different authors, in different places at any time whatsoever.
Thesis 3: It is all out there (but poorly accessible and incomplete)
The big challenge is not to create new data or build new layers of complexity, but instead to connect existing data to a smart lean enterprise management system.
How we can achieve this will hopefully become clear with this series of articles to follow. It will get a little techy from time to time, but we promise to keep it as easy as possible. So follow us to an open and connected AEC industry.
The Amberg Digital team at Amberg Group AG
