The DEDICATE seminar has been a splendid opportunity to discuss the curation and management of Built Environment related data as both a cultural phenomenon interpreted by a variety of professional communities and disciplines and a common technological framework for their activities.

This event especially pointed out the commonalities into both the stakeholders communities' necessities and requirements and, we think, stressed the urgent need for a shared agenda for this field.

I really feel obliged toward all the people that contributed to this event. In particular, I would like to thank all the speakers for both their generous presentations and the precious debate animation that concluded the event.

Today, with some delay, we publish in this post the presentations from the DEDICATE final seminar.

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Proprietary data formats, undisclosed specifications, partial standardisation, lack of adequate open formats, and the fast obsolescence of hardware, supporting operative systems and software are the major issues undermining both the data survival and reuse. Over-reliance on proprietary solutions, inadequate enrichment of assets with metadata, informal retention policies, idiosyncratic archival and management of data files are also important causes of information loss that occur just at the assets creation stage and that in some cases, such as in the AEC (Architecture Engineering Construction) sector determine economical damages even in the short term.

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The activities of DEDICATE are coming to a conclusion and we are approaching the last initiative of this project – a seminar aimed at discussing the issues and initiatives related to the Information Management of the Built Environment related data. This event will try to present the diverse operative and disciplinary approaches to the curation of the digital information concerning Architecture to demonstrate the cultural and technical convergence of the initiatives in this field and propose a common agenda to tackle both its shared problems and its discipline specific issues.

Are solutions at the intersections between domains?

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The Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) data model has reached past March the level of an international published standard, ISO 16739:2013, but its development started almost 20 years ago when Autodesk promoted the creation of an industry consortium to advise the company on the interoperability of digital information in the AEC market.

The late affirmation in the Building and Estate management sectors of the BIM technology now strongly associated with IFC is a good example too of their characteristic resistance to innovation. It is worth to mention that while professionals are often reported to still have difficulties to understand and accept the changes in their workflows implied by the implementation of BIM systems, ArchiCAD, the first software to provide BIM functions, was first launched on the market on 1987 and Revit, now the most popular software for BIM, was first released on 2000.

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