If you are looking for BIM Manager Jobs, one of the terms you have probably encountered in the job description is ‘managing and overseeing the collation and coordination of COBie data’—but what is COBie, and how does it relate to BIM?

What is COBie?

COBie stands for the Construction Operations Building Information Exchange, and it is an international standard that relates to the exchange of building information. It is most commonly used in the product data handover from the construction team to the operations team. What the COBie specifications do well is to capture the industry knowledge and best practice, what they do not do is dictate precisely what information is required for the project handover – the responsibility for that still lies with the project owner.

History of COBie

In 2011, the UK Government published its BIM (Building Information Modelling) Working Party Strategy, which announced its intention to complete all projects with collaborative 3D BIM by 2016. This report’s data and software requirements are what we now call the COBie.

This was in response to the fact that construction handover has always been a struggle as the information usually generated this far in a project is often only partly relevant for the operations team. This also means that a lot of new documentation needs to be produced and explicitly collated for them – which tended to be in the form of documents and paper drawings in binders. Therefore, the bulk of this documentation work tended to be put off until the end of the project, typically when budgets have been spent and deadlines are looming. With the digitalisation of the world, this information has gradually moved from the archive room onto the file server.

Basic Principles of COBie

COBie is a great stepping stone in moving construction information from paper to online. This is because the main aim of COBie is to replace home-grown exchange templates and point solutions with a more digital building information management lifecycle. The basic principles of COBie, therefore, are:

  • Classification—One of the key foundation principles for COBie is the use of a classification system—although no particular one is specified, it is up to the project owner which classification system they use. The point of using a classification system is that it helps users navigate the information, which helps familiarize owners and projects.
  • Data Model—COBie is aligned with the BuildingSMART data model, which means that It shares industry best practices. This makes integration with other construction and design tools easier and makes COBie a model view definition of the IFC data model.
  • Format—The information in COBie gives users the choice of several different delivery formats, including a spreadsheet-based data collection format. This format’s beauty is that it makes participation in an openBIM workload possible without requiring knowledge of the IFC data model or a specific BIM tool.

COBie Data Model Structure

As we have said before, COBie shares the structure of the buildingSMART data model and features three main areas – Design, Build and Common.

The design area is the core of the information. It contains information about components (the central piece of the asset register), types (product category), spaces (rooms), zones (space groupings), facilities (the building itself), floors and systems (equipment). The building information covers jobs, resources, and spare parts. It attempts to collect the non-standardised data typically found in documents such as maintenance guidelines, operating manuals, and spare part lists. The common items cover information that can be linked to all items in the other lists, such as contacts (people involved in the project), documents (documentation about the delivered equipment), attributes (method to tag custom data to any item type), and classification.

COBie is technically a simple concept. It is a system that allows you to start small and then grow as the building project grows.

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