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 1 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 performance Government Industry Forum October 31 2006 Sponsored by the Federal Facilities Council www nationalacademies org ffc 2 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 lessons learned in technical content to preclude contractual disputes and also to save re inventing the wheel on technical content by architects and engineers unfamiliar with the government s policies and regulations The model sections are kept technically current by peer review Since 2004 a contract between the National Institute of
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