The Development Process of a Cloud–based Bim Governance Platform

Cloud technologies are considerably utilised in BIM research and development, with the majority of research areas targeting the facilitation of team collaboration. One major hurdle for BIM adoption are issues resulted from team collaboration e.g. data loss, ownership and legal disputes. However, an argument has been put forward to utilise cloud-based BIM governance solution that have been developed specifically for facilitating team collaboration process in order to overcome such obstacles. In this scope, this paper presents the development process of a Cloud-based BIM governance platform (GovernBIM). An iterative software engineering approach is applied to underpinning the platform development, while the initial development of GovernBIM prototype’ functionalities is created mainly on the basis of the requirements and specifications obtained from a broad consultation with BIM experts. The results are encouraging and suggest that there is considerable potential for the use of cloud in BIM R&D, specifically underpinning the development of BIM governance solutions, due to the fact that it demonstrates high-performance computing and large amounts of storage scalability. Despite the fact that a number of concerns remain (e.g. privacy and security) the developed cloud-based GovernBIM platform opens up an opportunity to provide increased control over the collaborative process and resolve associated issues, e.g. ownership, IPRs, data inconsistency, and interoperability.