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001 The birth of the data era in construction
About 10,000 years ago, in the Neolithic era, mankind made a revolutionary transition in its development, abandoning the nomadic lifestyle in favor of sedentary life, which led to the appearance of the first primitive buildings...
002 From clay and papyrus to digital technology
The first documentary evidence in construction dates back to the period of pyramid building, around 3000-4000 BC (“Papyrus, 3rd century B.C. Language is Greek,” 2024). Since then, the keeping of written records has facilitated and...
003 Process as a tool for data-driven experience
At the heart of any process is the transformation of past experience into a tool for planning the future. Experience in the modern sense is a structured set of data, the analysis of which allows...
004 Digitalization of construction process information
For millennia, the amount of information recorded in construction has barely changed, but it has grown rapidly in recent decades (Fig. 1.1-5). According to the PwC study® “Managed Data. What Students Need to Succeed in...
005 Digital revolution and the emergence of modular MRPERP-systems
The era of modern digital data storage and processing began with the advent of magnetic tape in the 1950s, which opened up the possibility of storing and utilizing large amounts of information. The next breakthrough...
006 Data management systems from data mining to business challenges
Today’s companies are faced with the need to integrate multiple data management systems. Selecting data management systems, managing these systems well, and integrating disparate data sources is becoming critical to business performance. In the mid-2020s,...
007 Corporate mycelium how data connects to business processes
The process of integrating data into applications and databases relies on the aggregation of information from a variety of sources, including different departments and specialists (Fig. 1.2-4). Specialists search for relevant data, process it, and...
008 The beginning of the data volume boom as an evolutionary wave
The construction industry is experiencing an unprecedented information explosion. If we think of business as a knowledge tree (Fig. 1.2-5) fed by data, the current stage of digitalization can be compared to the rapid growth...
009 The amount of data generated in a modern company
In the last two years, 90% of all existing data in the world has been created (B. Marr, “How much data do we create every day? The Mind-Blowing Stats Everyone Should Read,” 2018). As of...
010 Cost of data storage the economic aspect
In recent years, more and more companies are outsourcing data storage to cloud services. For example, if a company hosts half of its data in the cloud, at an average price of $0.015 per gigabyte...
012 Next steps from data theory to practical change
The evolution of data in construction is a journey from clay tablets to modern modular platforms. The challenge today is not to collect information, but to create a framework that turns disparate and diverse data...
034 Filling systems with data in the construction industry
Whether it is large corporations or medium-sized companies, specialists are daily engaged in filling program systems and databases with various interfaces with multiformat information (Fig. 3.2-1), which, with the help of managers, must interact with...
035 Data transformation the critical foundation of modern business analysis
Today, most companies are facing a paradox: about 80% of their daily processes still rely on classic structured data – familiar Excel spreadsheets and relational databases (RDBMS) (М. Shacklett, “Structured and unstructured data: Key differences,”...
036 Data models relationships in data and relationships between elements
Data in information systems are organized in different ways – depending on the tasks and requirements for storing, processing and transmitting information. The key difference between the types of data models, the form in which...
037 Proprietary formats and their impact on digital processes
One of the key challenges faced by construction companies during digitalization is limited access to data. This makes it difficult to integrate systems, reduces the quality of information and complicates the organization of efficient processes....
038 Open formats are changing the approach to digitalization
The construction industry was one of the last to address the problem of closed and proprietary data. Unlike other sectors of the economy, digitalization has been slow to develop here. The reasons for this include...
039 Paradigm Shift Open Source as the End of the Era of Software Vendor Dominance
The construction industry is undergoing a shift that cannot be monetized in the usual way. The concept of data-driven, data-centric approach and the use of Open Source tools is leading to a rethinking of the...
040 Structured open data the foundation of digital transformation
While in past decades business sustainability was largely determined by the choice of software solutions and dependence on specific vendors, in today’s digital economy the key factor is data quality and the ability to work...
041 LLM chat rooms ChatGPT, LlaMa, Mistral, Claude, DeepSeek, QWEN, Grok for automating data processing processes
The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) was a natural extension of the movement towards structured open data and the Open Source philosophy. When data becomes organized, accessible and machine-readable, the next step is a...
042 Large Language Models LLM how it works
Big language models (ChatGPT, LlaMa, Mistral, Claude, DeepSeek, QWEN, Grok) are neural networks trained on huge amounts of textual data from the Internet, books, articles and other sources. Their main task is to understand the...
043 Utilizing local LLMs for sensitive company data
The appearance of the first chat-LLMs in 2022 marked a new stage in the development of artificial intelligence. However, immediately after the widespread adoption of these models, a legitimate question arose: how secure is it...
044 Full control of AI in the company and how to deploy your own LLM
Modern tools allow companies to deploy a large language model (LLM) locally in just a few hours. This gives complete control over data and infrastructure, eliminating dependence on external cloud services and minimizing the risk...
045 RAG Intelligent LLM -assistants with access to corporate data
The next stage in the evolution of LLM application in business is the integration of models with actual real-time corporate data. This approach is called RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) – Retrieval-Augmented Generation. In this architecture, the...
046 Choosing an IDE from LLM experiments to business solutions
When diving into the world of automation, data analysis, and artificial intelligence – especially when working with large language models (LLMs) – it is critical to choose the right integrated development environment (IDE). This IDE...
048 Python Pandas an indispensable tool for working with data
Pandas occupies a special place in the world of data analysis and automation. It is one of the most popular and widely used libraries of the Python programming language(“Python Packages Download Stats,” 2024), designed to...
049 DataFrame universal tabular data format
DataFrame is the central structure in the Pandas library, which is a two-dimensional table (Fig. 3.4-6) where rows correspond to individual objects or records and columns correspond to their characteristics, parameters, or categories. This structure...
050 Next steps building a sustainable data framework
In this part, we reviewed the key types of data used in the construction industry, got acquainted with different formats of their storage and analyzed the role of modern tools, including LLM and IDEs, in...
051 Learning how to turn documents, PDF, pictures and texts into structured formats
In the era of the data-driven economy, data is becoming the basis for decision-making rather than an obstacle. Instead of constantly adapting information to each new system and its formats, companies are increasingly striving to...
052 Example of converting a PDF -document into a table
One of the most common tasks in construction projects is to process specifications in PDF format. To demonstrate the transition from unstructured data to a structured format, let’s consider a practical example: extracting a table...
054 Converting text data into a structured form
In addition to PDF documents with tables (Fig. 4.1-2) and scanned versions of tabular forms (Fig. 4.1-5), a significant part of information in project documentation is presented in text form. It can be both coherent...
055 Translation of CAD data (BIM) into a structured form
Structuring and categorizing CAD data (BIM) is more challenging because data stored from CAD (BIM) databases are almost always in closed or complex parametric formats, often combining geometric data elements (semi-structured) and metainformation elements (semi-structured...
056 CAD solution vendors move to structured data
From 2024, the design and construction industry is undergoing a significant technological shift in the use and processing of data. Instead of free access to design data, CAD -system vendors are focusing on promoting the...
057 Speed of decision making depends on data quality
Today’s design data architecture is undergoing fundamental changes. The industry is moving away from bulky, isolated models and closed formats towards more flexible, machine-readable structures focused on analytics, integration and process automation. However, the transition...
058 Data standardization and integration
Effective data management requires a clear standardization strategy. Only with clear requirements for data structure and quality can data validation be automated, manual operations reduced and informed decision making accelerated at all stages of a...
059 Digital interoperability starts with requirements
As the number of digital systems within companies grows, so does the need for data consistency between them. Managers responsible for different IT systems often find themselves unable to keep up with the increasing volume...
060 A common language of construction the role of classifiers in digital transformation
In the context of digitalization and automation of inspection and processing processes, a special role is played by classification systems elements – a kind of “digital dictionaries” that ensure uniformity in the description and parameterization...
061 Masterformat, OmniClass, Uniclass and CoClass the evolution of classification systems
Historically, construction element and work classifiers have evolved in three generations, each reflecting the level of available technology and the current needs of the industry in a particular time period (Fig. 4.2-8): First generation (early...
062 Data modeling conceptual, logical and physical model
Effective management of data (structured and categorized by us earlier) is impossible without a well thought-out storage and processing structure. To ensure access and consistency of information at the storage and processing stages, companies use...
064 Creating a database using LLM
Having a data model and description of entities through parameters, we are ready to create databases – storages, where we will store information coming after the structuring stage on specific processes. Let’s try to create...
065 Center of Excellence (CoE) for Data Modeling
With data becoming one of the key strategic assets, companies need to do more than just collect and store information correctly – it is important to learn how to manage data systematically. The Center of...
