Budapest Open Knowledge Meetup - open data and open formats in building construction

The March event of the Budapest Open Knowledge Meetup series took place on March 23, titled “See through the walls!”

Márk Zahorácz guided us through the services and experiments of the Lechner Knowledge Center: 3D modeling with drones and lidar, e-construction log, ÉTDR construction licencing system, TeIR (Spatial Planning and Development Information System), etc. New and planned mobile applications will enable easier use of such services. It was discussed, how the “openness“ of such data and interfaces could be further enhanced, however the current regulations, property rights and security issues do not support it. Cartographic registers were also in focus, regarding how separate these databases are and if they were worth to be integrated similarly to the Dutch joint spatial database? The participants also compared the accuracy, computing and hosting requirements of different automatic spatial modeling procedures.

Ádám Tamás Kovács, PhD student at BME Department of Architectural Representation, introduced us to BIM (Building Information Modeling) and explained how it could ease the work and cooperation of various industries during the planning, construction and maintenance processes. It was again concluded that building plans are data not typically to be made open, but sharing them would be useful for owners and maintainers. From BIM plans numerous data can be extracted upon which a public or industry-specific database could be built. It was further discussed if it could be established years later what the reason for a planning decision was, and how argument mapping and data visualization could help to reconstruct such decisions.

In the coffee break informal discussions covered BIM practice in Hungary and how some CAD manufacturers try to offer BIM-compatibility. Soon a comprehensive Hungarian BIM-guide will be published.

It has been agreed that this topic is worth to be discussed again in about a year in the course of the current BOK Meetup series.

(András Micsik and Ádám Tamás Kovács organizers)