Government/Industry Forum October 31, 2006 Sponsored by the Federal Facilities Council www.nationalacademies.org/ffc 1 SpecsIntact and the Unified Facilities Guide Specifications Support buildingSMART Bill Brodt Prepared for the Federal Facilities Council Government-Industry Forum: Engineering, Construction, and Facilities Asset Management: A Cultural Revolution, The National Academies, Washington, DC, October 31, 2006 NASA and buildingSMART. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and its U. S. Army Corps of Engineers and Naval Facilities Command partners are leading the way in making construction specifications support the concepts embedded within buildingSMART. The cooperating agencies expect higher quality, clear construction specifications, better designs, and reduced costs to maintain specifications as a result of these efforts. The real estate, architectural/engineering and facility management industry is moving to adopt interoperable standards such as the International Alliance for Interoperability's Industry Foundation Class Model (more recently called “buildingSMART”). NASA and several other federal agencies, as well as other organizations of which NASA is a member, support the concept of interoperable standards, but all encounter various obstacles to actually implementing interoperable standards.. By mid-2004, the author realized that NASA was using systems, and even leading some activities, which could be more closely integrated to support implementation of the prototypical interoperable model. In particular, SpecsIntact, the Unified Facilities Guide Specifications (UFGS), the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Project Extranet (ProjNet(sm)) suite of software, and the Whole Building Design Guide were all used by NASA and its SpecsIntact partner agencies. SpecsIntact, a NASA developed system for creating construction specifications, has been cooperatively managed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Navy and NASA for several years. The SpecsIntact system has features to handle many tasks necessary for specification preparation which are not provided by standard text editing programs. The system permits the user to choose MS Word as well as PDF output format for processed sections or entire projects. A new Windows-standard menu and toolbar—as well as a redesigned, customizable tags bar—makes navigation easy. A new “Reference Wizard” also makes it easier to search, insert, check and edit references, and prevents misplacement of references in a document. SpecsIntact automatically notifies users of new software and UFGS releases. Since adding the capability to register users, NASA and its partners have discovered that SpecsIntact is currently used by about 14,000 people, a sufficiently large number of users to influence the construction specification discipline with respect to buildingSMART.Government/Industry Forum October 31, 2006 Sponsored by the Federal Facilities Council www.nationalacademies.org/ffc 2 Many of these people are strong supporters of the software and the model specifications as illustrated by these user comments: “Perfect! Just what I needed. I'm a big fan of SpecsIntact (having started off doing redlines by hand), and I appreciate that you're directing your resources towards the software itself and support….” Greg “I find SpecsIntact to be easy to use and a nice tool for specifications. Thank you.” Sam West “The ‘SpecsIntact Updates Section Properties Before Renaming Section’ fix is going to be very nice, as well as many of the others. The intelligence that can be written into a Section using tags makes SpecsIntact a superior editor to work with, once you get used to it.” Christopher E. Grimm CSI CCS MAI RLA From its earliest days, SpecsIntact was designed around the capabilities of Standard Generalized Markup Language, the precursor to eXtensible Markup Langauge (XML) which has become an industry standard for web-based applications and electronic commerce. The opportunity to foster the prototypical interoperable model by transitioning SpecsIntact into XML so it could more easily support buildingSMART model was quickly apparent. SpecsIntact originally supported the individual specifications developed by Army, Navy and NASA, but under the direction of Congress, the Army and Navy began to merge their master text into the UFGS, a set of model construction documents developed to meet requirements established in federal laws, regulations, Executive Orders and U.S. Office of Management and Budget directives. In setting the stage for supporting interoperability and to reduce costs, NASA joined the UFGS. When NASA started its merger, it had 221 specification sections. By the time the merger is completed, NASA will have only 11 unique sections. By working together these collaborating agencies are building best practices in terms of building commissioning, energy, and environmental requirements into the model specifications. The agencies also save money in managing the text. In combination, these specifications influence a significant segment of the U.S construction industry. Several important new features are being added to SpecsIntact: • Alphanumeric Paragraph Numbering. SpecsIntact currently supports paragraph numbering in accordance with federal requirements, but will be enhances to also support alphanumeric numbering. This will open SpecsIntact to a wider industry market;. § Better Table Handling. SpecsIntact has had limited ability to handle tables, but will soon offer substantially improved table editing, viewing and printing.. § Submittal Tracker A new project named Construction Operations Building Information Exchange (COBIE), which is discussed later in this paper, was initiated by NASA as a contribution to the national effort to improve performanceGovernment/Industry Forum October 31, 2006 Sponsored by the Federal Facilities Council www.nationalacademies.org/ffc 3 and productivity within the building industry with additional support from the National Science and Technology Council’s Physical Infrastructure and Security Interagency Working Group. COBIE was initially built from a SpecsIntact and UFGS basis, but its rapid development as a more robust structure generated the need to improve the SpecsIntact submittal tracker in order to support the emerging requirements. The UFGS are time-tested by the successful completion of federal projects. They incorporate
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