Data driven decision making in the design and construction process can lead to greater efficiency in productivity, more accurate design to budget, and better communication and coordination. Assemble customers realize significant time savings and reduction in errors by extracting BIM data, interrogating the information, conditioning it, and validating change quickly. In fact, access to the data is so easy that we are often asked in depth questions by our prospective customers about how we extract data, the accuracy of the information, and how Assemble data is different from other systems.
The integrity of building information modeling data and its use throughout planning, design and construction delivery is critical to your business and therefore a priority for Assemble. Transparency in how we extract data from models, the reliability of the data and our scale-ability are key principles reviewed to help our customers understand and trust that the information we provide is accurate and reliable.
Native Data Extraction
Assemble data extraction provides you with parameters and quantities directly from your authoring tool through the API. We do not reinterpret the data, modify it or represent it differently than how it is natively extracted. Rather, we provide you with the quantities and informational properties available in the model and in a few instances, even more. Our complete model inventory is a summary of the entire model contents and can be sorted, filtered, reorganized and conditioned in a way that is consistent with your other workflows and data sorts. We extend the value of the model and your investment in it by providing an open, flexible environment for validating, analyzing, and reporting this data; thereby enabling you to making better decisions.
Values associated with the various model parameters, such as length, width, height and volume have been rounded to 1/100th. By hovering over a value, actual values extracted from the model are displayed, revealing how Assemble rounds the quantities from the model.
In a few cases, Assemble provides calculated values that extend the usefulness of the data extracted; values that are not available directly through the API. In these isolated instances, at the request of our customers, we have added calculated values such as the following:
- Floors – EstimatedReinforcementWeight
- Structural Columns – Weight
- Structural Columns – EstimatedReinforcementWeight
- Structural Foundations – EstimatedReinforcementWeight
- Structural Framing – Weight
- Structural Rebar – EstimatedReinforcementWeight
- Walls – EstimatedReinforcementWeight
Data Reliability
Our data extraction processes must report data consistently, regardless of the modeling methods used, the model author, or the version of the product from which the model is published, so that you can rely on the data model after model.
With each release, Assemble conducts 1,334 different automated tests that run against every change that’s made in the product, which adds up to over 88,000 automated tests over the course of a single release, and we perform over 283 different manual acceptance tests prior to rolling out for production. Our comprehensive test suite ensures the data you see in the model is consistent and reliable.
Additionally, with each release we are testing against several hundred real world models to ensure you get the results you expect. Routinely we find differences between versions of Revit and work very hard to address these inconsistencies internally or with the Revit Support Team.
Data Scale-ability
Our prospective customers frequently give us their largest models to test our capabilities. These models continue to get larger and more complicated. At Assemble, we leverage enterprise class Microsoft SQL Server capabilities to ensure our infrastructure scales with your increasing model complexity and data access needs. Assemble allows you to publish models of nearly unlimited size and complexity.
In addition, we work with best in class partners such as Rackspace and Amazon Web Services to ensure access to your data is highly available and safe through our standard redundant backups.
At Assemble, we understand that data is critical to your business decisions and we’re working with the best developers, partners, and infrastructure in the industry to provide you with the most reliable and scale-able service possible. Now that we have pulled the curtain back and revealed the key principles that are the foundation of our system, you should have the confidence that Assemble data, no matter how fast we deliver it to you, is valid and accurate, and can be trusted to help you make tough project decisions at the speed of today’s business. Feel free to contact us if you have any further questions.
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