Christina Hvid

CEO of Molio

“One of the key challenges for the wider adoption of digital technology in construction has been the lack of an industry-agreed method for digitising and exchanging digital information. This is one of the reasons why we, as an industry, haven’t been able to leverage the potential of digital data and are still heavily dependent on time-consuming manual processes in all stages of the construction process. This, of course, affects the bottom line. The ambitious goal of our new project is to change all that.”

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Implementing a common digital language in the Danish construction industry

Molio is developing a common data dictionary and a common data structure for digital information exchange of construction data in the Danish construction industry.

Molio is the Danish construction information center that provides digital tools and services to facilitate access to relevant knowledge, information, legislation and practices within the construction industry.

Need

To accelerate the digital transformation of the Danish construction industry, Molio identified the need of a common digital language that will enable free flow of information between all actors.

Challenges

Today, there are many different digital solutions that are developed to facilitate various business processes within the construction sector.  The main challenge is that these solutions are not connected. They use different data formats, which creates silos and hinders the collaboration between all stakeholders.

Solution

To enable the industry to break away from information silos and analogue processes, Molio started creating and implementing a common data dictionary as a national context for the Danish construction sector which is developed according to all relevant international standards for data management. For this purpose, Molio has started implementing the data dictionary Define and customising it to Danish practice and legislation. By standardising the way data is created and managed, Molio will ensure that the digital information can be used by all construction actors and interpreted correctly by the different systems that they work with.

  • 1. As the project aims to encompass the entire Danish construction sector and requires input from many different experts, Molio established a dialogue and engaged a wide diversity of stakeholders – from decision makers to digitalisation specialists, software providers and construction industry experts.
  • 2. A steering committee was established comprising experts from all points in the construction supply chain.
  • 3. Molio decided to adopt an agile approach to project development, addressing specific scenarios within the industry and providing solutions to the market as they mature.
  • 4. To develop the new Danish context, Molio took advantage of data templates and construction object properties based on relevant European product standards that are available in the data dictionary Define. New use cases and relevant properties are chosen by the steering committee, while additional user groups of subject matter experts are created to qualify and do quality assurance of the new digital content according to the process described in the standard EN ISO 23386.
  • 5. Molio developed a range of properties that will enable actors to exchange digital data during the design stage in accordance with the Danish LOD framework, called the Construction Element Specification, as well as properties that are essential for operations and maintenance. Additional properties were created to address identification and classification of construction objects.
  • 6. Molio is preparing to soft launch its content to the market, both through a public view page as well as through API integration.
  • 7. They are currently running pilot projects with different software providers. The goal of the work is to integrate the newly created data dictionary content within BIM management tools.
  • 8. Once the so-far created content is available to the industry and applied on real projects, Molio will continue expanding the scope by developing content for further use cases.

Expected results

The successful implementation of the pilot projects is key for the development and adoption of the common digital language across the Danish construction sector. Getting a first-hand successful experience with data collaboration is very important to demonstrate the value that it can bring.

An industry-wide adoption of a common data dictionary and a common data model across the entire Danish construction sector will accelerate drastically its digital transformation. It will enable Danish construction to start tapping into the benefits of digitaliastion: automated and more efficient processes, lower operational costs, and reduced environmental impact.