Presentation on Open Data delivered by Paul Wilkinson at the COMIT Community Day held on September 8th at Hemel Hempstead, hosted by Sir Robert McAlpine

1. Open Data:
Digitalisation and the industry currently known as construction
Paul Wilkinson
director, pwcom.co.uk Ltd

2. Data Disruption
 Moving from document-centric to
data-centric collaboration
 Beyond business intelligence (BI): 'Big Data'
 'The Internet of things'
 'Smart Cities'
• Web 3.0 - the semantic web
Q: Do today's AEC businesses get the built environment
'Big picture'?

3. Open Data
“… some data should be freely available to everyone to use
and republish as they wish, without restrictions from
copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control.”
(source: Wikipedia)
• Open data is data that anyone can access, use or share. It is
published under a licence expressly permitting its access,
reuse, sharing and modification.
• It is not subject to restrictions, licenses, copyright, patents
and charges for access or re-use.

4. Open Data
Open data does not involve indiscriminate use of all
information.
It relates to the controlled release of certain types of data that:
• is not confidential
• does not contravene personal data protection provisions
• does not compromise commercial relationships or
intellectual property rights
• does not threaten the security of individuals or
organisations

6. Open Data in the UK
• In 2010 UK created the Open Government License and
Data.gov.uk site (OS and TfL, among others, began to
contribute some data sets for public use)
• Since 2010, UK has become a world leader in open data
• In July 2013, UK signed G8 Open Data Charter
• UK has topped all three editions of global Open Data
Barometer since 2013
• In October 2015, UK was one of 17 signatories to
International Open Data Charter

7. Why go ‘open?’
Arguments in support of open data include:
• "Data belong to the human race” – genomes, data on
organisms, medical science, environmental data, etc.
• “Publicly funded work should be public”
• “Data is an enabler” – of socio-economic development
(healthcare, education, transport, economic activity, etc.)
• “Openness enhances research value”

8. Why not ‘open?’
Arguments against open data principles include:
• Privacy – access to data should be limited to specific
users or to sub-sets of the data
• Remuneration – collecting, 'cleaning', managing and
disseminating data can be labour- and/or cost-intensive
• Cross-funding
• Cost-recovery
• Additional processing – Raw data may need additional
processing (analysis, apps etc) to be useful to others

9. Data released by governments should be:

18. What does this mean in construction?
Government’s Construction
strategy (May 2011)
defined need to:
“derive significant improvements
in cost, value and carbon
performance through the use of
open shareable asset
information”

19. Linked Data
“... if the past was document sharing, the future
is data sharing” (Tim Berners-Lee)
1. A URL should point to the data.
2. Anyone accessing URL should get data back.
3. Relationships in the data should point to
additional URLs with data.

20. Why is linked data important for construction?
• Linked data connects and provides context
to social interactions and to data about the
physical world we live in.
• BIM will increasingly apply Linked Data
principles throughout the asset lifecycle.
Finding and linking relevant, related
information will become increasingly
important.

22. Linked data

23. 'Big Data'
'Big data' generators include:
• mobile devices
• software logs
• cameras
• microphones
• RFID readers
• wireless sensor networks
• streaming instrumentation

24. 'Big Data' and construction
• Construction very information-intensive
• Traditionally paper-based
• Now more (mainly unstructured) data
captured, but not always de-silo'ed
• Opportunities to mine existing data, and to
combine with other internal and external data
sources – acquired, licensed or open (eg: Land
Registry)

25. Digitalisation and the
industry currently
known as construction

26. Digitisation and the economy
Mckinsey Global Institute (December 2015)
Digital America: A tale of the haves and the have-mores

27. Digitisation and the economy

28. Mckinsey Global Institute (December 2015)
Digital America: A tale of the haves and the have-mores

29. Mckinsey Global Institute (June 2016)
Digital Europe: Pushing the Frontier, Capturing the
Benefits.

30. Digital Built Britain
• The creation of a set of new, international
‘Open Data’ standards which would pave the
way for easy sharing of data across the entire
market
• The establishment of a new contractual
framework for projects which have been
procured with BIM to ensure consistency, avoid
confusion and encourage open, collaborative
working.
• The creation of a cultural environment which is
co-operative, seeks to learn and share
• Training the public sector client in the use of
BIM techniques such as data requirements,
operational methods and contractual processes
• Driving domestic and international growth and
jobs in technology and construction

31.  Synthesis of multiple trends
Digital Built Britain

32. Digital Built Britain

33. Four possible implications of converging trends
• Suppliers increasingly focus on value-adding business
outcomes: “asset services” backed by data
(eg: 'illumination', not light fittings)
• More 'whole asset life-cycle' data-connected approaches
• Rationalised, more integrated supply chain organisations
(vertical industry specialists – joined by data)
• Construction = data-driven, lean, safer, lower carbon ...
“sophisticated manufacturing”

34. Industry 4.0 – WIIFM?
• As we move from selling one-off assets to providing real-
time data-driven asset services, the customer relationship
moves from occasional to continuous.
• Data both deepens the relationship and keeps the brand
'front of mind'.