NEWSLETTER

Great Progress on BSD LinkMan-E

BSD LinkMan-E (LME) is a BIM interoperability product that is designed to connect CAD modeling applications, automated specifications authoring products, cost estimating applications, and potentially other data producing and consuming applications in the AEC industry. More specifically, BSD’s initial LinkMan-E product will connect BSD SpecLink-E and Autodesk Revit Architecture 2009 and 2010. The goals of the connection between the applications are several:

• Provide a summary view that lists the building products and/or construction assemblies used or available for use as identified by each application (i.e. a view listing all referenced Revit construction assemblies and a separate view listing all products referenced by SLE).
• Provide a building products view composed of a comprehensive product list that is used to identify which products are “active” in each application. This is the “Products Dashboard” comparative view that immediately reveals which products have been referenced in the BIM model and which are referenced in the specifications; discrepancies are immediately apparent.
• Provide a similar list of construction assemblies identifying which assemblies are referenced in the BIM model and which are referenced by the specifications. This is the “Assemblies Dashboard” view that compares construction assembly content with the products specified in SpecLink.
• Provide a way to manipulate the specifications text to include specs for additional building products and/or remove irrelevant specifications based on information presented in LME.
• Provide a mechanism to support changing the contents of a Revit family type to create an alternative construction assembly for connecting to the specifications and cost estimate.
• Avoid altering coding systems (such as the Assembly Code property) which may be in use by the customer for other purposes. Avoid utilizing the Revit “materials” properties which are typically used to define graphic patterns for application to specific products and assemblies.

To avoid conflicts with other uses of various modeling properties, LME identifies Revit objects by their unique family, category and type names. To provide a consistent interface and connecting system, LME provides its own extensible set of building product object and construction assembly names. It supports associating one or more products to “create” an assembly, so that assemblies in turn represent a collection of building products. The resulting extensible library of products and assemblies provides the objects to which all other applications relate. In the future, we expect these objects to use Omniclass nomenclature and other standards to describe the built environment but until these standards mature and stabilize we will continue to use our own definitions.

There are four View tabs in the current LinkMan, consisting of the SpecLink Project View, the Revit Project View, the Products Dashboard View, and the Assemblies Dashboard View. The bottom panel of the Assemblies Dashboard lists products for the currently selected assembly displayed in the top panel. Revit objects (family types) are connected to LinkMan assemblies. BSD is building the assemblies to match a number of the Revit objects that ship with the Revit Architecture product, and “pre-linking” them to the corresponding Revit objects. But it is also a simple matter for users to create their own links.

To create a new assembly in LME, go to the Assemblies Dashboard and click Add Assembly to bring up the assembly dialog. Set the location of the assembly in the UniFormat hierarchy and drag and drop the products that will be members of the assembly from the Products Dashboard. To link a Revit object to the assembly, simply drag the object from the Revit Project tab and drop it on the assembly.

BSD is also creating product objects in LME and linking all of the products in SpecLink-E to corresponding LME product objects. The products you drop on the assembly are probably already linked to SpecLink, but it’s easy to create products and link them yourself using a process similar to that for assemblies. Click the Add New button in the Products Dashboard group, select the appropriate MasterFormat location for the new product and insert the product name and any notes. When you add a new product in SpecLink-E and give it a product tag (PL), it will be automatically included in the SpecLink Project tab. You can drag it and drop it on the corresponding LME product object to create the link between them.                                                             

You can use the Products Dashboard tab to either manually select those SpecLink products that will be required in the specifications, or click a button to automatically select all products that correspond to products used by assemblies in the Revit Project model. Since the products in SLE are linked to other relevant text, you essentially pre-edit the specifications before beginning the actual editing. And once you’ve linked things in LinkMan, LME remembers your products, assemblies and links for your next project. They are linked automatically as soon as you open the SLE project with LinkMan and associate it with the Revit project.

LinkMan-E is a sophisticated monitoring and communication system that in some ways gives you a better overall content view of your Revit model and your SpecLink specifications than the native applications do. It also gives you control over your specification content and a way to modify the product content of the model for linking by other applications. LinkMan is being demonstrated at CSI’s Construct2009 Exhibition in booth 4252 and is expected as a Beta release in fall 2009.