The struggle for open data in the construction industry. The history of AUTOLISP, intelliCAD, openDWG, ODA and openCASCADE
Fighting over data or a joint collaboration between Nemetschek and Autodesk to promote open workflows?
April 2024 marked a special event for the construction industry: the two leading manufacturers of CAD (BIM) systems, whose tools are used to create much of the documentation for construction projects, announced in a joint communiqué that they will begin promoting open and interoperable workflows throughout the entire building lifecycle:
Optimizing workflows across Nemetschek and Autodesk will allow data to flow more easily from one cloud platform or desktop application to another, so that details get to the right people at the right time.
In 2024, the two Autodesk and Nemetschek Group announced that they will begin promoting open workflows
The initiative aims to promote open and interoperable workflows, which, according to CAD vendors’ logic, should be applied to cloud platforms and desktop CAD (BIM) applications. These changes raise many questions related to cross-platform interoperability and data openness:
- Why have major CAD (BIM) corporations started to actively discuss cross-platform interoperability?
- How do CAD (BIM) vendors themselves process data from other CAD (BIM) products?
- Who were the first to open proprietary CAD vendor formats?
- Why does Autodesk use ODA’s SDK?
- How did the LISP tool, influence the creation of intelliCAD and the OpenDWG alliance?
- How are ODA, IntelliCAD, Nemetschek, Autodesk and openCASCADE related?
- How does the global construction industry and its performance depend on the degree of openness of multiple data formats?
- Where did the first open alliances and initiatives in the CAD industry come from?
- How does the opacity of CAD data reduce BlackRock’s financial results?
We will explore these and many other questions on the topic of data in the construction industry by drawing on historical data and facts.
The order of chapters in the article with chapter number and main topic indicated
1. What CAD (BIM) vendors use to transfer information between products
2. The advent of AutoCAD, the first AutoCAD hack, and the creation of AutoLISP
3. The emergence of IntelliCAD and the official discovery of the DWG format
4. How the OpenDWG and LibreDWG alliance evolved from IntelliCAD
5. Open Data Capital Nizhny Novgorod and Saint-Petersburg: IntelliCAD, Bricsnet and SoftDev
6. OpenCascade and SDK CAD Exchanger
7. Struggle for TrustedDWG and “correct” version of DWG format
8. Emergence of open IFC format and IAI-buildingSMART organization
9. Graphisoft’s problems and the emergence of openBIM to promote the IFC format
10. Problems, opacity and dependencies of IFC format
11. The emergence of CPIXML in Germany as a response to the quality problems of the IFC format
12. the opening of the proprietary Revit format and the emergence and use of the IFC SDK from ODA Autodesk.
13. Where does the idea of collaboration and making peace between CAD (BIM) corporations come from?
14. Who runs the CAD companies and owns the data in the construction industry?
15. Why financial giants choose CAD corporations instead of construction business
16. Transition from de facto to de jure data standards
17. Conclusion, the topic of big data and AI
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1. What CAD (BIM) vendors use to transfer information between products
In 2024, all major construction and engineering companies and all CAD vendors use software development kits (SDKs) from the Open Design Alliance (ODA), CAD Exchanger and Tech Soft 3D, or tools built on these SDKs, to capture data from CAD (BIM) formats and process it.
Figure 1.1 shows the list of official strategic members of companies and major customers of the Open Design Alliance (ODA), CAD Exchanger and Tech Soft 3D that use SDKs for working with CAD-MCAD (BIM) data. In this list you can find all companies involved in the development of CAD-MCAD (BIM) products without exception. To them are added multinational corporations such as Siemens, Microsoft, HP, NASA, Airbus, Apple and hundreds of thousands of other medium and large companies that work with data from CAD-MCAD (BIM) formats.
Today, no major CAD (BIM) vendor and no significant construction or design company in the world working with data in CAD (BIM) formats accesses data through APIs, plug-ins of closed CAD programs or IFC format. All top tier companies either get open data from CAD (BIM) formats directly through SDKs and reverse engineering, or use tools that provide such services.
Reverse engineering is the result of the struggle for openness of data and applications that occurs when some platforms temporarily occupy a monopolistic position. Developers of other systems feel that this dominance is not always justified, and create reverse-engineering tools to convert closed formats into open data.
Figure 1.2 shows a list of several thousand companies that officially use the ODA SDK to access data from various CAD (BIM) formats.
Most of the applications developed by these companies (Figure 2.2) using SDKs allow them to take all data from CAD formats through reverse engineering and convert it to the formats required by their customers. Some of the recent examples of using reverse engineering SDKs are:
- Tekla (Trimble) using ODA SDK added an extension to export/download RVT (Revit) file in 2023
- Graphisoft (Nemetschek) with ODA SDK introduced the ability to load/unload RVT (Revit) models into ArchiCAD basic function from 2020
- Nemetschek has introduced the ability to upload/download RVT (Revit) models to Allplan from 2021 thanks to ODA SDK
- Bentley has a solution for direct interaction with RFA (Revit) in OpenBuildings Designer starting in 2020
- Autodesk is using ODA’s IFC SDK from 2020 to integrate the SDK into Revit to export data in IFC format
The use of SDKs for reverse engineering of closed CAD (BIM) formats arose from the need for increased functionality, performance and data streaming. This need is similar to what happened with the DWG format of the AutoCAD program thirty years ago.
Closed formats are becoming open through the efforts of individual professionals and alliance initiatives that disagree with the proprietary and closed nature of the data and seek to expand the use cases for use in their tools or in streaming tools.
In 1998, the OpenDWG Alliance was the first to open the proprietary DWG format, which began the official history of openness of proprietary CAD (BIM) formats.
Figure 1.4. Since the mid-1990s, the major CAD formats have been opened up through alliances and initiatives of individual specialists
However, the unofficial history of hacking-opening closed formats began earlier than is commonly believed. In 1987, a group of developers semi-legally hacked AutoCAD in an effort to improve its performance. Ten years later, these key developments were officially acquired by Autodesk. And at the same time, these same developments allowed the two new alliances to later officially open the proprietary DWG format.
2. The advent of AutoCAD, the first AutoCAD hack, and the creation of AutoLISP
Almost 40 years ago, Mike Riddle, after working on CADDS at Computervision (where he worked with PTC and Revit creators Samuel Geisberg and Leonid Reitz at the same time), developed Interact, a program whose architecture and DWG file format laid the foundation for AutoCAD, which was first released in 1982.
John Walker, one of the future founders of Autodesk, planned to buy Interact for $8,000. Instead, Mike Riedl gave Interact to Autodesk for $1 and 10% of future AutoCAD sales. After Interact-AutoCAD sales skyrocketed, that 10% led to legal problems, and in 1992 Mike Riedl left the company for $12 million (Figure 3.1). Read more about the history of AutodCAD, Revit, Archicad and the history of the creation of companies like Autodesk, Graphisoft and buildingSMART in the video “Data Wars in Construction | Technofeudalism and the History of BIM”.
AutoCAD’s lightweight and relative ease of use product attracted engineers interested in exploring ways to improve the program and, indirectly, to open up the DWG format.
The story of “semi-legal opening” of AutoCAD program in order to increase productivity is described in detail in his Facebook post Dmitry Popov, who communicated in the early 90s with one of the founders of Autodesk Richard Handyside. Dmitry’s post is reproduced in an abridged version:
AutoCAD in 1985 was not CAD as it was understood at the time. Where is the real help to the engineer in calculations, the most time-consuming part of his work? Where is the search for design options? How can this handicraft help in designing a technological process at all?
In fact, in 1985, AutoCAD was a rather awkward electronic easel. Alternative and similar functionality was also available in CAD solutions Medusa, TurboCAD, Microstation, etc.
But AutoCAD was not hopeless, it had a built-in LISP interpreter. Autodesk programmers took XLISP, a public and open source dialect written by David Betz, and adapted it for AutoCAD (a story similar to the emergence of the Dynamo tool for Revit from Grasshopper). In the original implementation from Autodesk, LISP (XLISP) was extremely slow and prone to frequent crashes and errors. It was clear that nothing serious could be written in it, and Autodesk planned to abandon LISP in AutoCAD in the late 1980s and start using the “C” language for the same purpose.
But later, it was the redesigned LISP that became the weapon that allowed AutoCAD to trample its competitors in the PC CAD niche. And this weapon of victory was forged for Autodesk by two researchers named Petrov and…. Petrov.
On one of his visits to the USSR in late 1987, Autodesk Vice President Richard Handyside was introduced to two engineers, Yuri and Sergey Petrov. They didn’t have a complete solution for compiling and executing LISP programs for AutoCAD at the time, but they guaranteed that if they could access the internal functions of AutoCAD, they could do so in a very limited time frame. Even if they “don’t get access”, they could do it too, but it would be a little longer.
Richard Handyside discussed the idea with the other founding fathers of Autodesk and the two Petrov engineers traveled to Sosalito, California to bring their solution to release. By this time, in 1989, the two Petrov engineers had already cracked the AutoCAD code and were able to plug in compiled LISP (later AutoLISP) modules directly, but Richard was not told.
In 1989, Richard Handyside, one of the founders and vice president of Autodesk, set up a joint venture with Spartak Chebotyryov’s Infograph company in Moscow. Richard came up with the name for the joint venture — “Parallel”: it meant that modern technology was coming from the West to the Soviet Union, and knowledge was going to the West. In 1989, Autodesk Ltd. invested £98,000 (£250,000 at 2024 exchange rates) in the joint venture.
What was done by the two Petrov engineers in the Parallel joint venture provided source code protection for third-party developers. AutoCAD application developers could now sell their programs and tools written for AutoCAD in LISP without fear that the results of their labor could be easily copied. The number of AutoCAD enthusiasts and applications began to grow rapidly, and an international community of AutoCAD developers began to emerge. The AUTOLISP compiler made programs run much faster, and it was possible to do some serious calculations with the AUTOLISP compiler.
Autodesk did not forget the two Petrovs, the contract for technical support was not signed with them at first, so the engineers from JV “Parallel” received several more orders to adapt their code for each next version of AutoCAD. JV “Parallel” Moscow and St. Petersburg also developed AutoCAD MAP and Database Connectivity for AutoCAD, a department that later moved almost entirely to San Rafael, California branch of Autodesk.
In the mid-1990s, Peter Petrov from JV Paralel went to America and opened Basis Software Inc., which developed a modern visual programming environment in LISP — Vital-LISP. By the way, this was not the only project, moreover, it was actually a spin-off. Basis Software wanted to make the very fulcrum that Archimedes needed to turn the Earth upside down. Unfortunately, the bar was set too high, so we will never know what would have happened to the CAD industry if Basis Software had succeeded in realizing its vision.
However, the first component was created — a visual programming environment in LISP, but money began to run out, there was nowhere to get funding to continue the project. Autodesk saw in the development from Basis Software the solution to all its problems: In 1997 Autodesk bought Vital-LISP and renamed it. In mid-1998, Autodesk released a new tool for creating AutoCAD applications called Visual LISP (Vital-LISP). A significant difference between Visual LISP and AutoLISP was that the new version of LISP was used more often for industry programs and Visual LISP programs were five times faster.
The AutoLISP language has become the primary tool for developing specialized applications for CAD systems. It became a key element in AutoCAD and over time has become one of the main software interface tools for many companies, providing applications ranging from control systems to specialized symbol libraries. Some of the companies that built businesses on creating AutoLISP applications, such as Softdesk and intelliCAD, later played a significant role in officially opening up the DWG format and creating the OpenDWG alliance.
Thanks to Autodesk’s marketing efforts, AutoCAD became a powerful designer using the AutoLISP and Visual LISP languages, establishing a monopoly in the design market, which displeased other CAD program developers. The proprietary DWG format became the dominant format for storing design data, and dozens of companies around the world actively sought to expose the closed DWG format.
3. The emergence of IntelliCAD and the official opening of the DWG format
Ralph Grabowski describes the timing of the AutoCAD clones as a logical step on the part of users who were not willing to pay Autodesk’s escalating subscription prices each year:
AutoCAD is the target of many similar software vendors precisely because it is the most successful general purpose 2D/3D CAD program of all time. With four, six, eight, twelve million users (no one knows for sure) of 35-year-old software, entrepreneurs figure there must be a certain percentage of users who want something that costs less, even if it does less.
AutoCAD was targeted after Autodesk pissed off the wrong people who could afford to pay to direct their ire at Autodesk. These stories are long, but because of them, companies like IntelliCAD, Open Design Alliance, and Graebert Gmbh are now well-established organizations offering great alternatives in the marketplace.
Autodesk kept the binary structure of the DWG format secret from competitors and limited access to its own libraries for reading DWG files. This strategy, while common in the software industry, has led to numerous attempts by other companies to reverse-engineer the format.
OpenDWG Alliance (later Open Design Alliance) with its IntelliCAD product, which allowed to work with DWG format in any CAD program, was able to officially overcome the barrier of DWG file modification. OpenDWG Alliance leveled the playing field for all CAD developers, and it is to it that such well-known companies as British TurboCAD, Belgian Bricsys, German Graebert, French DraftSight, Chinese ZWSoft, Russian NanoSoft and thousands of other companies owe their success.
The history of the OpenDWG Alliance (Open Design Alliance) began with Autodesk’s attempt to buy SoftDesk and specifically its IntelliCAD product.
In 1994, Softdesk, then the largest third-party developer of AutoLISP products for Autodesk, acquires IntelliCAD.
But then Softdesk management became worried about not becoming a competitor to Autodesk and ordered the IntelliCAD project to be shut down. However, the CEO made arrangements to continue the project, and so a company with the new name Boomerang (IntelliCAD) was spun off and then incorporated on October 1, 1996. In the meantime, Boomerang employees continued to work on IntelliCAD without pay and without rights to the technology, developing an AutoCAD clone that included a programming language very similar to AutoLISP with the goal of completely replacing AutoCAD.
Shortly thereafter, events occurred in rapid succession:
- On November 25, 1996, Softdesk sent Boomerang an agreement that included benefits such as free office occupancy worth $4,000 per month. Boomerang signed the agreement
- December 4. Softdesk kicked Boomerang out of the office and terminated negotiations
- December 5. Softdesk took possession of everything that “belonged” to Boomerang
- December 10. Autodesk announced the purchase of Softdesk for 72 million dollars
Autodesk, when buying Softdesk, according to Softdesk’s lawyers, “seemingly” did not inform Autodesk about the Boomerang product and its AutoCAD clone, and Autodesk for its part “did not suspect” of such a product. But B&T’s lawyers “identified an antitrust defect in a quasi-monopolist merger designed to suppress a potential competitor’s technology.”
When a law firm specializing in software antitrust investigations informed Softdesk of the antitrust issues, Softdesk refused to transfer Boomerang’s technology to IntelliCAD and offered Boomerang only $7,500 to drop the IntelliCAD product. While Boomerang and Visio were negotiating the agreement, Softdesk’s general counsel, “who couldn’t hide the horror in his voice,” called and offered to reopen negotiations with Boomerang. The antitrust threat worked.
As a result, one of Softdesk’s main products, Boomerang (IntelliCAD), was transferred by antitrust court decision to Visio, which was later bought out by Microsoft. Microsoft acquired Visio for $1.2 billion dollars in early 2000. To this day, Microsoft owns the code found in IntelliCAD 98 and up to IntelliCAD 6. IntelliCAD 7 was the first version released by the IntelliCAD consortium to be completely free of code owned by Microsoft.
4. How the OpenDWG and LibreDWG alliance evolved from IntelliCAD
After the Softdesk takeover, efforts to open up the DWG format not only did not stop, as Autodesk had sought, but instead intensified. Developers began to decentralize their efforts, distributing know-how among different companies instead of concentrating it in one company.
When you tear out one weed, you strengthen another weed.
Jean de Labruyere
According to Martin Day of AEC Magazine in describing the events of the late 90’s in the CAD market:
Slowly but surely a rebellion was rising to undermine the Empire (Autodesk — author’s note), and all enemies of the Empire contributed to the creation of the Open Design Alliance (OpenDWG-ODA — author’s note) and the IntelliCAD Technical Consortium to reverse engineer and clone the file format and provide cheaper but compatible drawing tools
IntelliCAD 98 went on sale in 1998. Initially priced at $495; upon release, the price dropped to $149 as a “special introductory price.” As of the end of June, IntelliCAD had sold about 12,000 licenses in the first three months, generating $3 million in gross revenue. In May 1998, IntelliCAD suddenly becomes incompatible with AutoCAD. Autodesk releases an update to AutoCAD R14.01 that makes changes to the DWG format and prevents IntelliCAD from reading drawing files. Six months later, Visio updates IntelliCAD 98 to work with AutoCAD 14.01 files.
In February 1998, Visio Corporation (with its IntelliCAD product, which it inherited from Softdesk), convinces 14 other software firms to contribute $25,000 each to start a new organization to fight for an open DWG format. And Autodesk’s main competitors in the CAD market form a new alliance called OpenDWG:
- Baystate Technologies Inc.
- DATACAD LLC
- Diehl Graphsoft Inc
- Eagle Point Software Inc.
- IMSI
- Informative Graphics Corp
- Inso Corp (Nasdaq: INSO)
- Intergraph Corp (Nasdaq: INGR)
- Ketiv Technologies
- Nemetschek AG
- Parametric Technology Corporation (Nasdaq: PMTC)
- Robert McNeel & Associates
- SolidWorks Corp
- Visio Corp (Nasdaq: VSIO)
In support of their decision, The Wall Street Journal is running a big article protesting from CAD vendors against Autodesk’s absolute appropriation of the rights to the DWG format.
The OpenDWG Alliance (ODA) aimed to level the playing field for all CAD solution vendors, regardless of their relationship with Autodesk. The OpenDWG Alliance brought together developers and users who planned to use Autodesk’s DWG format as an open industry standard for CAD data exchange.
The alliance’s board of directors was set up with a limit of two dozen seats to prevent the concentration of power in the hands of individual members in ODA. This structure resembles that of the Linux Foundation, a successful open source organization that has 15 platinum members, each contributing $500k per year, with the difference that OpenDWG was organized by Autodesk’s competitors rather than by companies that were really interested in making the DWG format available to all users.
In 2005, Autodesk was asked to join the Open Design Alliance, but the company declined and rejected the offer. As Martyn Day rightly points out in his article on the relationship between Autodesk and ODA:
In my conversations with Autodeskers, they ironically point out that they would join the ODA Alliance if they got the libraries of all the other members’ proprietary CAD products (from Bentley, EDS, PTC, Graphisoft, Nemetschek, ESRI and CADKEY) in return
ODA was designed to be resilient to destruction and structured so that neither Autodesk, Visio, nor any ODA member could destroy it. If OpenDWG were to die, its libraries would be donated to another non-profit organization to ensure that they would always be available.
Individuals or organizations wishing to use the libraries in their non-commercial products could join OpenDWG at the “Associate Member” level free of charge. To join the organization, a potential Associate Member only had to agree to a “membership agreement” posted on the ODA website. The Associate Membership Agreement was perpetual, free and open to all from 1998 to 2007.
In 1998, using the open source and free OpenDWG libraries, the GNU LibreDWG initiative emerged, a library that could read the DWG format. However, LibreDWG could not edit or write information to DWG files. One of the drawbacks of the first version of LibreDWG, which was based on 20% of the OpenDWG code to read the format, was the documentation and variables in the library were written in Esperanto.
In 1998, the OpenDWG Alliance claimed 2,000 members, but this figure is probably the result of counting all those who downloaded a copy of the OpenDWG toolkit from the website page. According to OpenDWG Alliance PR firm, McKenzie Kesselring, OpenDWG provided a list of about 112 commercial members in 1998, with subscriptions of several thousand dollars.
With the formation of the OpenDWG alliance in 1998 ended the underhanded struggle between small products intelliCAD (Visio) c Autodesk and began an open confrontation between large corporations such as Intergraph, Nemetschek Group, PTC and SolidWorks on the one hand and Autodesk on the other, in the issue of openness of the DWG format.
A key role in these confrontations was played by the efforts of developers from Nizhny Novgorod, who since the late 1990s have made significant contributions to the development of products of the OpenDWG alliance, the IntelliCAD consortium, Bricsnet and the OpenCascade geometry kernel.
5. Open Data Capital Nizhny Novgorod: IntelliCAD, Bricsnet and SoftDev
One of the main founders and active members of the OpenDWG alliance, in addition to Visio with IntelliCAD, is IMSI, a company known for developing the CAD software TurboCAD. TurboCAD debuted in 1986 and, along with AutoCAD, was one of the first computer-aided design (CAD) software products designed for use on personal computers.
Already in the early 1990s, IMSI began outsourcing the development of its flagship product TurboCAD. During a 1993 trip to Russia by TurboCAD distributor Martin Sachs, IMSI hired 3 Russian programmers to work on TurboCAD — among them were Victor Bazarov, who later went to work for IMSI in San Rafael, Sergey Slezkina and Alexander Presnyak, who in 1994 organized a software consulting company SoftDev in Saint-Petersburg.
TurboCAD, developed by SoftDev, differed from AutoCAD in its ability to work with geometric and dimensional constraints in its product. According to Moritz Botha, IMSI/Design Technology Director, it was their implementation that inspired Autodesk to create similar functionality in AutoCAD 2010. TurboCAD’s developers largely followed AutoCAD’s functionality and offered a great return on investment. DWG compatibility was promoted in the company’s marketing along with the development of support for the AutoLISP and ARX programming languages.
Through contacts with Paralel JV, which developed AutoLISP and VisualLISP, Sergei Slezkin and Alexander Presnyak became key developers of TurboCAD and founded SofDev. Sergei Slezkin started his career in the British IMSI Design and then headed product development in the OpenDWG alliance, which was later renamed the Open Design Alliance (ODA). As part of his work in ODA, Sergey Slezkin was also involved in code correction of ODA managers who came to ODA, some of whom became alliance presidents in the 2000s.
Under the leadership of Sergey Slyozkin, SoftDev created tools for correcting errors in DWG format files, which allowed ODA to be ahead of Autodesk in some aspects. Despite SoftDev’s significant achievements in software development and cooperation with well-known CAD companies, many customers do not even realize that SoftDev is behind the products they use.
In 2005, the openDWG Alliance faced internal problems caused by the embezzlement of 600 thousand dollars collected from membership fees. This led to the resignation of the then ODA president Evan Yares and the election of a new president, Arnold van der Weide, who had previously been president of the IntelliCAD Technology Consortium.
Bricsnet (BRICS) was behind the development of the IntelliCAD consortium, which had previously acquired SoftDesk. In 2000, Bricsnet entered into an agreement with Microsoft to distribute and support IntelliCAD in the US and Europe, and Bricsnet chairman and CEO Hector Rodriguez was appointed to IntelliCAD’s board of directors in 2010.
BRICS (Bricsnet), organized by Belgian entrepreneur Erik de Keyser, developed an architectural modeling package that became the basis for Bentley’s TriForma product. The relationship between Bentley and BRICS did not work out well, and Bentley eventually returned its stake in the company in exchange for the source code of the architectural software. In the late 1990s, BRICS became a provider of Internet-based information management solutions in addition to architectural software and changed its name to Bricsnet. From 2010 to 2018, Erik de Keyser becomes vice president of the Open Design Alliance.
The BricsCAD platform (BricSys) has developed tools for application creators in the CAD industry, an important step to improve AutoLISP functionality. BricsCAD has serious advantages over its competitors and is now used in hundreds of applications to work with CAD data (Figure 4.2).
In 1999, under the agreement, Bricsnet began providing existing IntelliCAD Consortium customers with technical support and offering upgrades to the new version of IntelliCAD 2000. As part of the agreement with the Visio Division of Microsoft, Bricsnet committed to release a commercial version of the new IntelliCAD 2000 product in the first quarter of 2000. Bricsnet became responsible for all technical support issues for existing IntelliCAD customers and provided free upgrades for those who purchased a maintenance agreement. The Microsoft Visio division provided Bricsnet with profiles of all existing IntelliCAD users and notified its existing customers that they could receive technical support, upgrades and new licenses from Bricsnet.
Territorially, Bricsnet development teams responsible for IntelliCAD products, were based and conducted their development in Nizhny Novgorod.
The city of Nizhny Novgorod also became the place of the main development of another open source project in the CAD world — OpenCascade — the only free open source geometry kernel, and alternative SDK CAD Exchanger, for working with data from CAD (BIM) formats.
6. OpenCascade and CAD Exchanger SDK
The Open CASCADE Technology (OCCT) team and head of development Roman Lygin provide the world’s only free geometric CAD kernel. Roman Lygin is one of the world’s most important engineers in the field of working with geometric kernels.
Since 1999, Open CASCADE has taken a significant step towards openness for the entire CAD industry, giving the world not only access to the format, but also to its geometric core and platform for 3D modeling in the CAD/CAM/CAE domains. This move has enabled developers around the world to build their own applications on the powerful and flexible OpenCascade platform.
The free Open CASCADE library has become the basis for many commercial and research projects in various industries, including automotive, aviation, shipbuilding, energy, medicine and others. This library is used in such well-known projects as FreeCAD, SALOME, IfcOpenShell and BlenderBIM and thousands of other projects.
In 2024, almost any free or open source CAD product is very likely to use the single free Open CASCADE geometry kernel for geometry.
Open CASCADE SA has “played a gambit” with open source in order to capture a more promising market. The loss of the limited profits the company could earn from licenses is more than offset by large orders from industrial companies to develop specialized applications, as well as technical support and consulting contracts with independent commercial software developers. Open CASCADE SA was the first CAD/CAM/CAE company to take a revolutionary approach to promoting open source by changing its business profile from software developer to service provider. The Open CASCADE team has been successfully applying a business model based on industrial Open Source for more than 15 years.
In 2009, the creators of the OpenCascade geometry core expanded their activities by adding a new direction — SDK for reverse engineering data from CAD (BIM) formats. This decision allowed them to follow the example of their neighbor in Nizhny Novgorod, Open Design Alliance. CAD Exchanger’s customers included Apple, Tesla, Amazon, NASA, Fujitsu, General Electric, and 150 thousand other corporate users interested in open data from closed CAD-MCAD (BIM) formats.
The marketing challenges faced by teams from Nizhny Novgorod and Saint-Petersburg developing key open source tools for SDK CAD (BIM) formats are described in detail by Ralph Grabowski. In his journey notes, he reveals the historical background and analyzes the interconnections between companies working in this field.
Nizhny Novgorod and Saint-Petersburg has played a significant role in the global CAD industry, becoming since the mid-1990s the center of development of a number of key technologies in the topic of open data for the CAD-MCAD industry. SoftDev, founded in 1997, and other local developers, such as those who worked on Bricsnet, intelliCAD, OpenCascade and the CadExchanger SDK, have helped Nizhny Novgorod establish itself as a world leader in engineering software development.
In the late 1990s, with the emergence of the IntelliCAD consortium, the OpenDWG alliance, and the OpenCascade open core, Autodesk faced increased competition and pressure. In response, Autodesk began developing new methods to increase the security and complexity of its proprietary DWG format. These actions were aimed at maintaining control over the use and processing of data in the DWG format in order to limit access to the format from third parties.
7. Fighting for TrustedDWG and the “correct” version of the DWG format
Since the confrontation with the OpenDWG alliance and the intelliCAD consortium, in order to make life difficult for competitors and artificially limit competition (Article Autodesk intensifies the fight against the “Open DWG” file technology), Autodesk, since the late 90s, creates every few years a new version of the “correct” DWG format (while inserting Autodesk “watermarks” into the format). Eventually, passive resistance to DWG cloning technologies turned into a full-scale war, both in the courtroom and in the boardroom.
In 2004, the OpenDWG Alliance makes technical statements regarding a new compression algorithm in DWG that Autodesk has started using to make reverse engineering more difficult:
In AutoCAD 2004 DWG, a complex compression algorithm is applied to virtually all data structures, and file and section headers are encrypted using the magic number/XOR algorithm. The warning to users adds, “Although we support this format, users should continue to use AutoCAD 2004 DWG files with caution for projects that require long-term access to data because the format contains encryption.
Since 2006, the OpenDWG Alliance (Open Design Alliance) has been plagued by lawsuits from Autodesk seeking to trademark the name of the DWG format. Autodesk changed the DWG format to include an encrypted portion containing a simple sentence containing trademarked terms from brands such as Autodesk. AutoCAD DWG files that do not do this will warn the user that they are about to open a non-Autodesk DWG file. Autodesk motivated its decision by concern for users.
The system worked as a watermark, but ODA decided to include the watermark in their products and Autodesk sued them.
In 2006, the ODA (whose founders and strategic members include Visio-Microsoft, Nemetschek Group, Intergraph, PTC, Bentley, Graphisoft and Solidworks) and Autodesk sued for ownership of the letters DWG as a trademark owned by Autodesk. According to Autodesk’s general manager in the early 2000s, Carl Bass, Autodesk believed that some firms (part of the ODA) were misappropriating it, so the company has taken steps to protect what it considers its format. Autodesk’s long-term goal was to trademark DWG and deny other vendors the right to create products with DWG in the name or even use DWG as an acronym in their manuals.
In the end, Autodesk won the courts, and at first glance it looked like Autodesk had asserted its rights to the DWG format, but the injunctions were not the end of the world for the Open Design Alliance. The U.S. Trademark Office did not recognize file extensions as a “trademark” of DWG — and concluded that it was just another file extension, like DOC or TXT. The lawsuit was finally withdrawn in 2007, during which Autodesk and the Open Design Alliance entered into a settlement agreement.
ODA removed the TrustedDWG code from the DirectDWG libraries, and Autodesk changed the warning messages in AutoCAD 2008. As a result, the court decisions referred only to the “DWG” trademark, while the DWG file format remained publicly available.
The ODA activity contributed to Autodesk’s declining interest in maintaining AutoCAD, as the number of new features and changes to the DWG format after the settlement agreement with ODA began to decline with each new release.
In 2024, most CAD (BIM) tools that support importing, editing, and exporting data in DWG formats, (RVT, DGN and NWC, etc.) use SDKs from the Open Design Alliance (ODA). And Autodesk itself, 15 years later in 2020 after litigation and a peace agreement, officially joined the Open Design Alliance as a strategic member of the alliance.
Let’s go back to the late 1980s, when AutoCAD appeared on the world CAD scene, and trace the history of the alternative interoperability format IFC, which today CAD vendors offer to their users as a format for data exchange and storage instead of using application SDKs.
In Germany, where the IFC format was created — still little is known about the history of the IFC format because most of the participants in the history of the creation and registration of the IFC format signed NDAs.
8. Emergence of IFC open format and IAI-buildingSMART organization
The IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) format was initiated in the 1990s by Leonard Obermeyer, who commissioned the Technical University of Munich (TU Munich) to develop the new format.IFC, a standard for data exchange in the construction industry, is based on the STEP format. The STEP format, in turn, evolved from the IGES format, which was created back in the 1970s. STEP was originally developed for the needs of mechanical engineering and was well suited for use in CAM systems on computer numerical control (CNC) machines, where code files were processed line by line.
Leonard Obermeyer’s Munich colleague, Georg Nemetschek (founder of the Nemetschek Group), was at the same time strongly opposed to interoperability and cooperation between German companies and Autodesk and other foreign firms, as such partnerships opened the German market to CAD software developers from other countries. Georg Nemetschek developed highly specialized programs (mainly for statics calculation), which he had been selling since 1977. He believed that local software producers were not yet ready to compete for the CAD planning market in Europe with start-ups from the early 90s such as Autodesk, Graphisoft and PTC.
While working on international projects, Leonard Obermeyer worked closely with the CEO of the American company HOK and Autodesk partner Patrick McLemee, who helped him move the registration of the IFC format from Germany to America. In 1994, Obermaier registered the IFC format in Boston and transferred all rights to it to Autodesk, which in the same year created lobbying organizations to promote it.
Having obtained the rights to the IFC in 1994, in 1997 Autodesk took the topic of regulating the IFC-STEP format from the U.S. to the international level and renamed the Industrial Alliance for Interoperability (IAI) to the International Alliance for Interoperability (IAI).
Thus was born an organization that set out to regulate classification standards for the construction world through the IFC format known today as buildingSMART. Patrick McLamey, who has served as chairman of the buildingSMART board of directors since the organization’s incorporation, along with other key board members who have also been associated with Autodesk, continues to play an important role in the development of the organization.
In the late 1990s, Autodesk’s interest in developing the format waned, but at the same time, Hungarian company Graphisoft discovered that ArchiCAD was ideally suited to work with the IFC format, which became the impetus for actively integrating IFC into ArchiCAD.
9. Graphisoft’s problems and the emergence of openBIM to promote the IFC format
While Autodesk faces a challenge from the Open Design Alliance in the early 2000s, Hungarian company Graphisoft feels threatened by Autodesk . The growing popularity of Autodesk Revit, especially after Revit became a symbol of the new BIM concept officially introduced in 2002, has significantly strengthened Revit’s position in the 3D CAD market in Europe, where Graphisoft, with its ArchiCAD product, has historically dominated.
In 2012, adapting to changes in a market where the construction industry is no longer dominated by the term CAD, but by Autodesk’s new BIM concept, Graphisoft, together with Trimble, introduced a new marketing concept called OPEN BIM. This marketing initiative was aimed at countering Autodesk’s closedBIM approach. As part of this strategy, Graphisoft is also registering the OPEN BIM™ trademark, emphasizing its commitment to openness and interoperability in the new BIM industry.
Joining buildingSMART in the early 2020s, Graphisoft (Nemetschek) has decided not to further promote its OPEN BIM™ brand name, whereupon, the buildingSMART organization registers a new trade name under the openBIM™ brand.
By 2024, thanks to new concepts from CAD vendors, construction professionals have the “freedom of choice” of CAD-BIM data processing technologies launched by Autodesk in 2002. Additionally, the core processes of classifier regulation and data exchange processes via the IFC format are under the control of a global organization created by CAD vendors as part of the openBIM™ concept promoted from 2020 by the buildingSMART alliance.
The challenge of interoperability from CAD vendors through the openBIM™ concept is the difference in data quality between the data quality produced by the SDK and the data quality in the IFC format, especially in 4D and 5D scenarios, which remains one of the format’s most pressing issues.
This problem is what CAD vendors are trying to solve today through collaboration and sharing of the IFC SDK from the Open Design Alliance.
10. Problems, opacity and dependencies of the IFC format
The problem of IFC format quality becomes obvious when data is transferred between systems of different CAD developers. If export and import modules are developed by the same company, for example, Autodesk, Nemetschek or Trimble, then all data will be transferred through IFC format correctly and without losses. However, when working with data from systems of different developers, problems arise due to the object-oriented approach and “small features” of the IFC format, which makes it impossible to fully correct export-import, rearrange data by geometry and correctly transfer data through the IFC format without laborious manual matching of all custom properties and geometry.
After a series of data export, import and interpretation, information can be lost or distorted. The joint study “IFC Software Support Benchmarking Study: GeoBIM”, conducted in 2019 by experts from London, Singapore, Dresden, Warsaw, Oslo and Rome, showed that different IFC programs when working with the same standardized datasets produce inconsistent results with few detectable common patterns, and there are significant problems in their support of the standard.
The technician receiving and interpreting the IFC file is usually unable to determine if data loss has occurred. Only the professional who exported the data can accurately determine if there has been a loss of information and how significant it is. This requires careful analysis and comparison of the information in the IFC file with the original model.
Therefore, the IFC format is generally used for geometry exchange. However, for high quality data or 4D/5D scenarios that require precise volumes, IFC is often insufficient if the exporting and importing systems belong to different vendors.
The solution to the problems with the quality of data transfer should have been the certification of programs according to buildingSMART standards, which, due to the observance of a large number of rules, would be the solution to the issue of correct implementation. The price of such buildingSMART-certification on IFC import and export for a small software company can start from 50 thousand or 100 thousand dollars (Figure 9), which is a big burden for the budget of such companies.
Unfortunately, you can’t fully trust the information about past certification, as the presence of a certificate from buildingSMART means that the IFC is only read, but the quality of that reading can only be guessed at.
All these complexities and problems lead companies that work with CAD products and their proprietary formats either to use SDK tools or to search for new formats that could reflect all the information about the project in a more efficient and better way.
Starting in 2020, Autodesk is partnering with Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and NVIDIA in parallel with the IFC to promote the open USD specification format and the new Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD).
In Germany, the CPIXML data format was developed as an alternative to the IFC standard, replacing the RVT and IFC formats for use in ERP systems in German-speaking countries. CPIXML was developed by specialists from Züblin, who had previously been involved in the development of the IFC format, which provided CPIXML with the experience and expertise needed for effective use in the construction industry.
11. The emergence of CPIXML in Germany as a response to quality problems with the IFC format
IFC was invented and developed in Germany (Munich), but most large companies in German speaking countries (DACH region) use the flat CPIXML — OBJXML format for their 4D-7D processes: ZUBLIN, STRABAG, HOCHTIEF, Bilfinger, Buro Happold, Implenia, Peter Gross Bau, Deutsche Bahn, Firmengruppe Max Bogl, WOLFF & MULLER, Drees & Sommer, ZECH Bau, Kohlbecker Gesamtplan GmbH, Arcadis, Deutsche Telekom, Die Autobahn GmbH des Bundes and thousands of other medium and large companies in the construction industry.
The CPIXML format was developed by RIB Software for the ITWO product, which originated in the BIM 5D department of Züblin in Stuttgart in 2009 to replace the parametric IFC. The ITWO product is a complete solution for construction project management, combining elements of an ERP system like SAP, MS Project and Synchro. ITWO was originally part of Züblin, but later spun off into a separate company, leaving a department within Züblin that continued to perform testing and development functions for ITWO’s ERP.
Strabag and Züblin, two of the largest building contractors in Europe, together with thousands of other participants in the construction sector in the DACH region, use the closed CPIXML format in the ITWO ERP system for processes related to project time and costing (4D-5D). Thus, the simplified CPIXML data transfer format, which is a triangular grid geometry in XML format with an additional single-level list of element properties and parameters, is actively used in the DACH region to store project data and optimize construction processes.
Despite its partnership with Autodesk, RIB Software has also been a regular paid member of the Open Design Alliance since 1999 and uses the free openCASCADE geometry kernel to develop its own semantic platform SCOPE. In 2020, RIB Software with its construction ERP ITWO goes to the French company Schneider Electric for 1.5 billion euros.
12. opening of the Revit proprietary format and the emergence and use of the IFC SDK from ODA at Autodesk
In order to reduce the human factor and increase the quality of implementation of all features of the IFC format Nemetschek Group and Autodesk today use the same IFC SDK from ODA.
In 2018, due to data quality issues from CAD programs to IFC format, the Open Design Alliance (ODA) is developing IFC Solutio, which significantly improves the process of exporting from Revit to IFC format. From ODA’s 2018 press release:
There is a great need for a universal, high quality IFC implementation supported by a professional development organization. ODA is ideally suited to meet this need”.
ODA becomes the first vendor to not just read information from IFCs, but to enable the creation of IFC geometry, something no other CAD company has ever been able to do. ODA’s complete open IFC toolset provides access to data and object creation, integrated with high-speed visualization and the ability to convert IFC data to other formats such as DWG.
This development proved so successful that within a year Autodesk began officially using the IFC SDK in Revit to export data to IFC, despite a previous competitive relationship with the alliance.
In May 2020, ODA will officially enter the market with its new product BimRv SDK, which offers to work with Revit data without depending on the Revit application. The tool allowed already in the first versions of the SDK, for example, to create Revit families (type geometry) without using the Revit program.
As a result, in September 2020 Autodesk made a strong-willed decision to join the ODA alliance, membership in which had been denied Autodesk for 20 years. Autodesk cited the reason for joining the alliance as “interest in ODA’s IFC toolkit”. Autodesk joined the buildingSMART organization, which Autodesk created in 1994 and which deals not only with IFC tools but also with the development of the IFC format itself, one month later, in October 2020.
Due to the pressure and activity of the ODA alliance to disclose company formats, starting in 2020 Autodesk is actively returning to managing its IFC format, building into Revit 2020 all of the IFC export capabilities that were not previously developed.
13. Where does the idea of collaboration and making peace between CAD (BIM) corporations come from?
The construction industry’s desire for openness and the formation of alliances have pushed two leading CAD software vendors, Nemetschek and Autodesk, to improve the interoperability of their products through the IFC format and SDKs from the Open Design Alliance. Maintaining the concept of exporting project data to IFC format is due to the fact that exporting to IFC format requires running CAD (BIM) programs, which is redundant for users who have the appropriate SDK.
The only way out for CAD vendors remains the development of an “interoperability concept” that will be supported further through cloud-based solutions where customer data is not only closed, but also not on the customer’s devices.
Autodesk, by joining the Open Design Alliance (ODA) instead of continuing to compete with Nemetschek, is seeking a new position as a proponent of “open processes” and an advocate of openBIM. It can be assumed that the new alliance between former rivals Nemetschek and Autodesk is aimed at maintaining dependence on proprietary CAD products, thus reducing interest in reverse engineering.
CAD vendors are looking to lead the way in developing as if “open technology” in the CAD world, following the lead of other companies in the technology industry such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP, which are also actively engaged in establishing leadership in open source development.
Over the past 20 years, Microsoft has evolved from an opponent and chief critic of Open Source to one of the largest and most powerful proponents of the Open Source principle. Microsoft fought the open source Linux operating system until the mid-2000s. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates called the GPL (GNU General Public License) a Pac-Man-like toy that devoured good code. In the 1990s, Bill Gates argued:
People who think everyone should have the right to program, to write complex programs freely — they are communists
Steve Ballmer, who succeeded Bill Gates as CEO of Microsoft, also compared Linux to communism in 2001 and called the Open Source Linux project the “cancer” of the industry:
Linux is not a public domain. Linux is a cancer that eats everything it touches in terms of intellectual property. That’s how its license works
The rise in popularity of Linux, Android, Ubuntu, Web CMS, the developer community and customers’ desires forced Microsoft and SAP to change their policies. Already in 2010 Microsoft “forced” to recognize the mistake of being biased towards free software, bought GitHub, brought .NET Core into Open Source and now actively participates in the development of open source projects (e.g. Linux), and even Steve Ballmer admits his love for Linux today.
Over time, it has become apparent to large technology companies that the open source sector harbors significant economic potential that many executives had previously underestimated. Open source not only fosters innovation and collaboration in software development, but also opens up new commercial opportunities through models such as support, consulting, integration and management services (Accenture, SAP, Microsoft).
But if Microsoft and SAP were until recently run by company founders who could make fairly contrarian decisions, who sets CAD company policy today and who determines through collaborations and alliances what data and at what price data engineers in the construction industry should work with?
14. Who runs CAD companies and owns the data in the construction industry?
Since the 2000s, all major CAD companies have gone public. They distributed their shares among hundreds of thousands of shareholders and found financial funds that were able to put together a management stake for each CAD company. Due to the fact that 70% of the company’s shares after going public are distributed among thousands of investors, the management stake can be as little as 7–20% of the shares, which gives the holder of the “small stake” the power to manage the board of directors in the company.
Large investment funds, such as BlackRock and Vanguard, hold significant stakes in many large CAD companies and companies developing CAD (BIM) solutions. By the mid-2020s, management of these companies has shifted from founders and product developers to hired managers appointed by boards of directors. The main goal of managers of CAD companies becomes annual growth of company capitalization and generation of dividends exceeding the inflation rate and income from government treasury bonds.
With the going public, the big CAD companies have effectively killed the competition in the CAD market in that major strategic decisions are no longer made by aggressive CEOs fighting for survival and market share, but by a board of directors that is controlled from outside by financial specialists who have a portfolio of almost every company in the CAD industry. Political scientist Jan Fichtner of the University of Amsterdam, researching these major financial players, argues, “Influence is mainly through background discussions. You behave in the face of BlackRock and Vanguard because you know that one day you may need their favor. It is rational for corporate and corporate executives to act in the best interests of the major stake holders.”
Thus, fund managers likely have little financial incentive to have companies in their portfolios competing fiercely with each other. To avoid internal competition in the same market, each of the five largest CAD companies specializes in different technology niches.
CAD companies strategically acquire programs and technologies that strengthen their position in their chosen field, thereby dividing the market and minimizing cross-competition. As a result, everyone involved in technology development in the construction industry eventually becomes part of a system that can be described as a planned economy.
Dr. Paul Stallings, who previously led the development of the ACIS geometric core, expressed his opinion about the closed nature of CAD formats:
With the simplification of exporting files from expensive CAD systems, the demand for such jobs may decrease. Users may start migrating data to less expensive systems, which will reduce the number of sales of expensive systems. Therefore, vendors of expensive CAD systems are motivated not to simplify the data export process in order to maintain market share.
As a result of monopolies fighting for power over data, the construction industry has become an outdated system with low labor productivity due to closed and complex data.
Despite the historical tendency to maximize profits in the CAD solutions market, financial corporations may not consider that this balance of investment allocation results in unforeseen losses in other aspects of their business that depend on open processes and data. The closed data and actions of CAD vendors negatively impact their construction assets and the management of their real estate assets.
15. Why financial giants choose CAD corporations instead of construction business
If we compare just two companies from the construction industry — Strabag and Vinci — and two from the CAD industry — Autodesk and Bentley — whose shares are equally owned by BlackRock and Vanguard, it is clear that the construction sector generates significantly more income for investors than CAD asset management. This disparity in returns is especially notable given the millions of other construction and real estate-related assets — managed by BlackRock and Vanguard. It is hard to imagine the annual losses suffered by Vonovia, one of BlackRock’s assets (9%) that owns about 500,000 properties in Germany, due to the insularity and complexity of CAD data containing information on construction and existing properties.
It is amazing how the entire construction industry of the world and its productivity depends on the openness of several data formats that are owned by CAD companies that did not create them, which in turn are owned by finance companies that have no interest in the closedness and complexity of the data.
Perhaps the true challenge for BlackRock and other shareholders of CAD companies is not an interest in creating CAD tools, but in realizing and reforming approaches to managing huge real estate assets through open data that will benefit primarily their shareholders, and indirectly the entire construction industry.
The construction industry itself, weary of the arbitrary behavior of CAD companies, is responding with its second open letter to Autodesk in the last few years, entitled “We are no longer satisfied with Revit”. These open letters, signed by the largest construction and design companies in the world, express dissatisfaction with the constant price increases for CAD products. This situation is very reminiscent of the industry sentiment that emerged in the mid-1990s a few years before IntelliCAD and the OpenDWG alliance.
But CAD vendors, as in the 1990s, are only increasing prices, explaining this with a shift to cloud-based storage and computing services. Companies have started moving customer data to cloud services from companies such as Amazon and Huawei. However, instead of providing storage services to customers, Amazon and Huawei themselves began using reverse-engineering SDK tools to reverse-engineer construction projects on their servers. CAD vendors’ customers can now expect new solutions for the construction industry to be offered already by Amazon and Huawei, which, in addition to storage and computing, are looking to create additional services for their new construction industry customers.
The use of SDKs to access quality data from closed CAD formats is becoming a trend and a necessity for all major companies in the construction industry. This allows developers to do without the intermediation and control of designers and engineers, and without the need to maintain good relationships with CAD companies that can at any time disconnect their users from cloud storage servers for their own reasons.
The lack of SDK tools for SMEs, and the lack of alternative formats, has made closed CAD formats the de facto standard for communicating project model information.
16. Transition from de facto to de jure data standards
Autodesk, having acquired the AutoCAD startup in 1982 for $10 and 10% of sales, and then successfully buying Revit in 2002 for $122 million, through marketing established the DWG and RVT file formats as the de facto standards for drawing documents and design models in the construction industry.
But Autodesk, despite attempts to develop ERP and 4D-5D tools for individual countries, does not fully understand how construction companies use data. Corporations lack real knowledge of the construction process in all countries of the world, where there is tremendous task variability and the need for a large number of custom solutions. Creating separate closed solutions is useless to increase the productivity of the construction industry.
Open data supplied by intelliCAD consortium and OpenDWG alliance began to support reading and writing of closed CAD formats. But the creators of the OpenDWG alliance are also CAD vendors, which, as Autodesk rightly pointed out, do not disclose the specifications of their own formats and, as a result, as well as Autodesk increase the price of using SDK tools.
Beginning in 2008, the Open Design Alliance increased the price for access to the SDK. From 1998 to 2007, OpenDWG’s SDK was distributed free for non-commercial use, and the cost for commercial use was $1000 under a perpetual license with an annual upgrade of $1000 when new versions were released. In 2024, only commercial use versions of the SDK for DWG formats (DGN, IFC) are offered at $7500 with an annual upgrade for $4500, and for Revit SDK format the price is $13,750 with an annual fee of $10,750.
Today, no large company in the world is interested in buying closed products and applications from which it is difficult to create in-line working processes. The author of this article has repeatedly faced the requirements of large companies to fully open the code of applications and processes themselves. It is unlikely that large companies will be interested in closed applications and formats in the future.
For this reason, unlike the major CAD vendors, companies like Microsoft and Adobe have taken the path of opening up their proprietary formats such as PDF and DOCX, XLSX, PPTX. This allowed turning these formats from de facto standards into de jure standards.
Documents in these formats can now be viewed, created, and edited using software from different vendors. Opening up these formats has fostered greater innovation, collaboration, and competition, with the result that users and Microsoft and Adobe themselves benefit from increased accessibility and flexibility in the use of software products.
In the construction industry, the irony of the situation is that CAD companies did not create these formats and did not develop these programs and therefore perhaps the new managers do not have the will to open the specification of the formats with a wave of the hand, as Adobe and Microsoft did. Because of the lack of transparency, the financial corporations who approve these managers and who are primarily interested in opening and simplifying data suffer in the end.
The transition to the use of open data, tools and standards is becoming an irreversible process that cannot be slowed down by the wishes of individual managers. We can only hope that managers of CAD companies, who are a dozen years away from retirement, may start to hand over the reins of format specifications to the construction industry, which will one day reach the point of building houses on Mars. Or we also in 20 years will not be able to build projects on the planet Earth, every time needing CAD vendors’ products to get the table of volumes and specifications from the CAD model database.
17. Conclusion, the topic of big data and AI
The future and trends in the construction world can be properly assessed more than anyone by the head of BlackRock, who said in an interview with Bloomberg in 2023:
I believe AI has tremendous potential. It will change the way we work, the way we live. AI and robotics will change the way we work and the way we build and we will be able to use AI and robotics as a means to create much greater productivity.
In the future, construction will depend on artificial intelligence (AI), which needs access to historical project data and open databases. But today, for many companies, this access is limited due to the closed nature of data in CAD (BIM) systems and cloud solutions, which prevents not only stream processing and automation, but also the accumulation of important historical data within companies that will later be used for machine learning and big language models.
The manual and semi-automated calculation of prices and temporal attributes of a project will inevitably be supplemented in the future by the opinion and calculations of machine learning models. New data will no doubt be generated from historical information, just as ChatGPT creates new text, images, and code from existing data collected over the years from all over the Internet.
The use of robotization, process automation and predictive modeling promises the construction industry to become more autonomous and less dependent on human factors. The movement from idea to finished building, akin to driving on autopilot without a driver in the form of a construction company and a navigator with a map in the form of a design company, promises to become independent of speculation and uncertainty.
A key step in the implementation of robotization, process automation, analytics, dashboards, big data and machine learning is the collection and analysis of open structured data. This data serves as the basis for creating historical arrays specific to each company.
Instead of exploring the topic of CAD data utilization, vendors are offering interoperability as a topic. And users, instead of working on data collection, data analytics, and parsing the logic of the processes, are now going into parsing the logic of interoperability between a large number of closed programs, trying to combine Revit, Archicad and BlenderBIM. Just as enthusiasts tried to swap files in the 2000s between Photoshop and GIMP.
But maybe it’s easier to just get JPEGs and PNGs from these programs? Why create an open source version of Revit (like open source-Photoshop) or save a parametric IFC (GIMP) when you just need to save the image to a simplified CPIXML, XLSX or USD (JPEG or PNG) for use in numerous applications where proprietary formats are no longer important?
Compare the market for using PSD and GIMP formats with the market for using JPEG and PNG.
Thanks to the development of SDKs from companies such as intelliCAD, ODA, CAD Exchanger, and Tech Soft 3D, by 2024, construction project data formats including IFC, RVT, PLN, NWC, and CPIXML have become interchangeable and complementary. A variety of formats including complex closed formats (PLN, DB1, RVT), parametric formats (IFC, BLEND), and simplified flat formats (CPIXML, USD, XLSX & DAE) now contain identical information about the same construction project.
Data from all these formats: closed, parametric and simplified can and will be combined in the future into Big Data, providing a single database where each project element has a MESH geometry (less likely BREP), BoundingBox coordinates and a set of attributes that allows to generate data for analysis (Figure 17.3). The use of such datasets is the first step in analytics, machine learning models, predictions, and the application of artificial intelligence technologies and large language models.
Open data and processes will provide the basis for more accurate estimates of project costs and timelines, preventing construction companies from speculating on opaque data. This is both a challenge and an opportunity for the industry to rethink its role and adapt to a new environment where transparency and efficiency will become key success factors.
Data is knowledge, and knowledge is power that defies artificially created barriers and constraints.
“Information wants to be free.”
Stuart Brand
👋 Please support the idea of using open data in construction by reposting this article or sending a PDF version to your colleagues.
Thanks to the efforts of the open data community, information about open formats and their use is spreading throughout the construction industry. Your contribution can be as simple as a simple repost or participation in relevant discussions.
PS. This article does not criticize bS, Autodesk, BlackRock or Vanguard. On the contrary, many arguments can be made in their defense. These large companies have more information than we do and accordingly can make decisions about what is best for the construction industry and where to invest. There are similar verticals in every company and social structure. I maintain that they are doing the right thing and anyone in their shoes would do the same. Since 2021, I keep writing and saying that these are natural processes. The only question is whether at some point we can help these companies to choose the path of using open data and open tools, the path that Microsoft and Adobe have already taken, to make life in the construction industry more productive and efficient.
📺 Youtube: Lobbykriege um Daten im Bauwesen | Techno-Feudalismus und die Geschichte von BIMs
📘 Guidebook “DataDrivenConstruction. Navigating the Data Age in the Construction Industry”:https://datadrivenconstruction.io/index.php/books/