 detail and types of information. And as we've moved to working on the computer, we've continued to produce many different types of representation, some of which are specific to the early stages of design, others of which come in when we need to communicate at a great level of detail how a building is going to be constructed or procured. So one of the difficulties I think in terms of architectural software, as Eric was describing, is coordination between the disciplines, coordination between the different types of representation. Because traditionally the information about what connects one drawing to another, what are the associations, the links between drawings, has all been in the designer's head. That's knowledge that is part of the training of the architect or the engineer is understanding how the information in one drawing or in one type of representation relates to another. And where BIM comes in is part of the promise of BIM has been to coordinate those different forms of representation to find a way to link in a perhaps semi-automated way all of those different say views of the building. So if you think originally we had a lot of different connections between people, between representations, a lot of different languages, what BIM offers to do or promises to do is to simplify that exchange by creating a common set of standards or even a common working model that designers work on. So you have the different disciplines involved in the project and also different types of software. Some of that software used for analysis, some used for 3D modeling and design like the software you just saw. And of course, the problem with this is that in reality, the way that this has panned out is that we end up with a very homogeneous software environment, as York was also saying. There's just a couple of big players who are promoting or using BIM as a way to promote their software as a complete solution. And there are efficiencies in this. I mean there are efficiencies in terms of file exchange. I'm sure I don't have to explain the limitations to this audience. So there are also, there are many alternative implementations of BIM to sort of the homogeneous implementation. I mean one of them is instead of thinking of sort of the shared repository as a model, an actual model that everyone works on, to think instead of that shared repository as a set of rules or standards that create definitions and in a shared group of predefined objects. So that when when I refer to a wall or a door, I am talking about the same definition of a wall or a door as an engineer or a facilities manager. So in a way it becomes the shared repository or becomes in a way a semantic guide and as opposed to an actual model. But there are also limitations to that because in a way what we've done then is we've we've limited the range of expression or the range of different types of the way in which we can talk about the model is then limited by the set of standards that we have agreed upon. And that usually is a good thing but occasionally can be a bad thing. For example if you want to do something that's out of the range of what can be defined in the standard or if we're just doing something that's a little bit different. So what Phil has been introducing for a while I think at Brighton Wood is the possibility of introducing bespoke software created with free and open source software that communicates with the repository the shared repository of building information and that at least potentially has a bi-directional relationship with that repository but that is not in a way bound by the same rules as the software that's used for the actual production of building information. So what we can do is we can create these bespoke projects that exist in a way have a kind of freedom for user for creation of user-generated content that then becomes part of that shared repository. So this project is one of those nodes and I'm just going to go sort of give you a quick run through of how this software works. So in terms of different types of representation one kind of representation that's commonly used in engineering and also in architecture where you have very complex building types such as hospitals is what's called topological representation and this is where you sort of you abstract the building down to a set of relationships or down to a very basic say mathematical model where you have nodes and edges where you're simply defining the you can define the node as a as a region within the building you can define the node as a room as an individual room you could define the node as a piece of equipment within a room but in each case what you're interested in and what you're looking at are simply relationships between those nodes and those relationships do not sort of imply a strict spatial relationship they can be considered in fact quite abstractly from from spatial modeling and this is something that's very useful especially at the early stage of design projects when you're trying to capture the knowledge that different stakeholders in the design process have about the elements within a building and the sort of in the way the constraints on the organization of those elements so for example this is from brydenwood this is an early topological or an early design sketch for a hospital where what you're doing is is really without committing to any particular plan geometry you're looking at what are the necessary relationships of adjacency and of connection between the rooms in that building um now this can be used as i said to look at adjacency connectedness it can also be used to look at flow the flow of people so here we're looking um this is another brydenwood diagram looking at outpatient flow and inpatient flow in the hospital so basically identifying what are the series of spaces that one has to pass through from entry to the hospital to um eventually leaving the hospital so it's another way of understanding okay through multiple different perspectives that um the experience of the hospital and there are many other applications for this you could say this topological modeling approach um okay so i'm just going to quickly walk you through a um an example of this so this is this is our software um this is running right now on a local um server so basically the the workflow is that you initially have to load models so these are ifc models so york was talking earlier about the ifc standard this is one of the primary exchange standards that exists in architecture and engineering construction uh field so we're using the ifc as a way to uh work with the model the the geometry and attributes that are created in uh in whatever so 3d authoring software is being used in the office and basically what we can do what we have here are a series of rooms these rooms are um the nodes that we're working with inside the rooms is furniture and equipment and what we can do is we can start to create linkages between those rooms as a way of sort of capturing um a particular set of relationships and you see here we have we have some layers so i can for example name this layer um patient flow and then that becomes a representation of the um of that particular set of relationships i can name another layer outpatient flow and then this one becomes and i can create a new set of relationships and this one becomes a um captures that that set of relationships and then this information can be exported as a csv and brought into um analysis software such as the network analysis software such as geffy to look at quantitative measures such as connectedness or relationships between the different layers or other other kinds of analysis that are um say the number of nodes or yeah yeah so the other types of analysis that that are available for um for evaluating graphs so i'll just i'll just look very quickly at at the software architecture we're using bim server um and bim surfer which is a web gl uh sort of 3d um visualization uh add-on um for bim server and we're exporting using csv uh that csv can then be reintegrated back into the bim data store or exported to um graph evaluation software like geffy so i guess in summary what we're doing is we're basically introducing a new type of representation to this sort of suite of uh say types of drawings or types of uh tools for representation that architects you know have available to use it's one that we that we as far as we know is not currently available um using the sort of 3d authoring software uh that that's coming used by architects the topological modeling so what we're hoping is to find different applications of this that can uh improve or add to the way that architects engineers facilities managers um sort of communicate and capture the knowledge that they have uh about the building check thanks very much