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
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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
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October 31, 2006
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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 Building Sciences and Information Handling Services provides automatic notification
to UFGS proponents of all reference document changes from more than 170 standardsetting organizations such as the American National Standards Institute and the National
Fire Protection Association. An automated Web-based process for handling change
requests from all users also was instituted. The currency and accuracy of the UFGS
greatly improved with these innovations.
The current release of SpecsIntact and UFGS supports MasterFormat 2004, a
construction classification scheme based upon the OmniClass taxonomy developed by
more than 80 organizations, government agencies and commercial firms to support
buildingSMART.
New to UFGS in 2007
§ NASA merging remaining Army and Navy sections. NASA has prepared a plan
is to complete the merger of specifications and incorporate other improvements to
make the specifications easier to read and easier to use by contractors. Priority is
being given to sections which are frequently used or more difficult to use in their
present form.
§ Automated routing, tracking and managing of criteria change requests. An
automated system for entering, routing and tracking of criteria change requests
was created, but not really implemented. With NASA joining the unified
facilities criteria community, it is essential to use the systems developed to
manage the many requests for changes submitted by thousands of users. This will
be accomplished via the Criteria Change Request System which is a web-based
system. Once a change request is approved, it will be tracked by the Criteria
Management System which keeps track of who is responsible for what criteria
and what is the current version of each document. A new Standards and Criteria
Program will be used to establish priorities for changes which require substantial
resource commitments.
Possible UFGS Changes in 2008
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•
•
Construction Specification Institute proposed new Section/Page Format. The
Construction Specifications Institute is revising its section and page format to
more closely align with the OmniClass taxonomy and buildingSMART.
Design – Build Specifications. Concise documents used in the design-build
environment may be incorporated into the UFGS database with the expectation
that many variations between the completely design-bid-build and design-build
may be useful.
COBIE. The previously mentioned COBIE project establishes an interoperable data
standard for construction submittal information. It is available for use through ProjNet as
well as through an EXCEL file. COBIE provides a structure and temporary repository
for construction submittal data so that it can be automatically accessed by the owner’s
facility management software. It’s can be thought of as a poor man’s building
information model.
Several factors prompted NASA and its partners to move forward with COBIE. Consider
that public agencies, private corporations, nonprofit institutions, and other organizations
regularly invest millions of dollars in acquiring buildings and other constructed facilities
to support their lines of business. Smart owners and operators require as-built information
including product data sheets, operation and maintenance manuals, design specifications,
testing and balancing reports to manage a facility efficiently and effectively throughout
its life cycle.
Typically such information is provided in hard copy form, however, and there is little
effort to integrate it into computerized maintenance management systems. If the entire
industry adopted an open data standard for electronic exchange of this essential
information, the benefits would include: availability of maintenance management
information at diverse locations; elimination of lost documents; improvements in
warranty management; and avoiding duplicate data entry from manufacturer to owner or
operator.
Facility managers attempting to populate key facility information within maintenance
management systems often find the process to be cost prohibitive. The current state-ofpractice for new construction is limited to the exchange of “electronic paper.” The most
successful electronic paper effort requires that scanned copies of paper documents be
provided at project turnover. The requirements for organizing these documents are
identified in UFGS-01 78 23 (April 2006), OPERATION AND MAINTENANCE
DATA, based upon recommendations from the Construction Specification Institute.
Whole Building Design Guide. The Whole Building Design Guide grew out of the
Construction Criteria Base, a large collection of documents supporting Federal
construction requirements which was originally distributed via diskettes. Today it is
searched by more that 1,000,000 people who download 500,000 documents each month.
It’s the source for SpecsIntact and the UFGS.
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ProductGuide, a new component of the Whole Building Design Guide, expects to put
product manufacturer technical information into the electronic information exchange
domain in a manner benefiting the entire building industry by demonstrating to product
manufacturers how to structure their information to support buildingSMART by
establishing standard COBIE-based templates. These templates offer promise for huge
time and cost savings for manufacturers, contractors and subcontractors seeking Federal
business.. (www.wbdg.org/productguide)
Additional information regarding SpecsIntact, the UFGS, ProjNetsm, and COBIE May be
found at:
SpecsIntact and the UFGS are available free from the Whole Building Design Guide
(www.wbdg.org), Additional information including a comprehensive tutorial for
SpecsIntact users is may be found at: http://si.ksc.nasa.gov/Support/users.htm
ProjNetsm(sm) is located at:
https://www.projnet.org/projnet/binKornHome/index.cfm?&SecureTry=1. Use the
HELP key to locate tutorials.
COBIE information is located as follows:
COBIE Overview Briefing:
http://nbims.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=352
Draft COBIE Requirements Analysis and Pilot Implementation Standard
Specification:
http://nbims.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=353
Draft Pilot Test Implementers Information:
http://nbims.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=355
COBIE Conference Call Chat Log:
http://nbims.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=356
2006-09-20 COBIE Pilot Implementation Spreadsheet:
http://nbims.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=357
Government/Industry Forum
October 31, 2006
Sponsored by the Federal Facilities Council
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Bill Brodt is an Experimental Facilities Engineer, Facilities Engineering and Real
Property Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC, (202) 358-1117 or
wbrodt@nasa.gov.
Government/Industry Forum
October 31, 2006
Sponsored by the Federal Facilities Council
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