Evening

Over the past few months since setting up my new company, Digital Guerrilla, I have been reviewing a number of things to get more indepth knowledge to assist my clients namely uniclass 2015, COBie & ifc. From these reviews I thought I would share what I have found which hopefully others will find of use. Please feel free to leave comments and further suggestions.

The following diagrams show a level 1 analysis of all the codes mapped across all the tables to see what align and what don’t. For this exercise, I have split the tables into 2 groups.

 

 

 

 

 

Group 1 – Complexes, Entities, Activities, Spaces/Locations

 

 

 

 

 

Group 2 – Elements, Systems, Products

Diagrams are from https://toolkit.thenbs.com/articles/classification/

Mapping table 1

Mapping table 2

You will notice that not everything aligns as you progress down the various levels which I have colour coded for ease. Products seem to have the most misalignment which is understandable given there are 6761 products.

I will be intouch with NBS on these misalignments, so hopefully this information will prove useful for future updates.

Some Stats – the above table lists the total number of uniclass codes and also the number that have NBS & NRM codes. % Refs refers to the number of codes that have a definition website. For LOD/LOI I have managed to list all the individual webpage for these (thanks to Tim Stidwill of Ramboll for finding this out) e.g for code Ss_15_10_33_34 the website link is https://toolkit.thenbs.com/definitions/Ss_15_10_33_34 then the LOD2 website link is https://toolkit.thenbs.com/definitions/Ss_15_10_33_34/?type=lod&detailLevel=2 so you can edit this to for LOD3-5 by just replacing the 2 at the end with the correct LOD number. This is similar with LOI 2 thus https://toolkit.thenbs.com/definitions/Ss_15_10_33_34/?type=loi&detailLevel=2 so again you can edit this to for LOI2-6 by just replacing the 2 at the end with the correct LOI number – simples. By listing all these in excel you can create and effective matrix that shows you all the definitions that exist on the NBS Toolkit (a total of 50,202 webpages covering all the LOD/LOI requirements that I have managed to find which are in addition to the overall definition pages which total 7,100 webpages.).

So, using the above code Ss_15_10_33_34 as an example, all the webpage links would be as follows:

https://toolkit.thenbs.com/Uniclass/Ss_15

https://toolkit.thenbs.com/Uniclass/Ss_15_10

https://toolkit.thenbs.com/Uniclass/Ss_15_10_33

https://toolkit.thenbs.com/definitions/Ss_15_10_33_34

https://toolkit.thenbs.com/definitions/Ss_15_10_33_34/?type=lod&detailLevel=2

https://toolkit.thenbs.com/definitions/Ss_15_10_33_34/?type=lod&detailLevel=3

https://toolkit.thenbs.com/definitions/Ss_15_10_33_34/?type=lod&detailLevel=4

https://toolkit.thenbs.com/definitions/Ss_15_10_33_34/?type=lod&detailLevel=5

https://toolkit.thenbs.com/definitions/Ss_15_10_33_34/?type=loi&detailLevel=2

https://toolkit.thenbs.com/definitions/Ss_15_10_33_34/?type=loi&detailLevel=3

https://toolkit.thenbs.com/definitions/Ss_15_10_33_34/?type=loi&detailLevel=4

https://toolkit.thenbs.com/definitions/Ss_15_10_33_34/?type=loi&detailLevel=5

https://toolkit.thenbs.com/definitions/Ss_15_10_33_34/?type=loi&detailLevel=6

Now everything was going great when I finished all my mapping etc. then NBS released an update (oh come on!! And I have since found out they plan on doing regular updates every 3 months?) so I had to go through everything again to see what was added, updated or removed, so here is the list of what has changed which should save you a few hours. (Note: NBS have kindly provided PDF’s of all the changes but not everything has been highlighted).

Over the past few weeks since I started looking at this I have come to realise we need to make these systems more accessible as most will never go into the detail I have gone as most don’t have the time as they are busy doing their day job. So how do we make this simpler? Answers on a postcard.

Hopefully this has provided an insight to some of the complexities uniclass has to offer and my findings are in some way of use.

Feel free to leave comments as keen to know what other insights people have found.

G