Data

Globally most organisations find it challenging to define the potential benefits of introducing new methods of working and technology in the built environment. One of the reasons why it is challenging to produce true figures about efficiency gains is that we have not started scratching the surface with regards to making infrastructure-related data usable, accessible and measurable. Data is also expensive, getting it right takes time, and getting it wrong is even more expensive.

Most of the currently available infrastructure data is unstructured and includes emails, documents, multimedia, video, PDF files, spreadsheets, messaging content, digital pictures and graphics. Whilst there is an emerging artificial intelligence (AI) industry developing algorithms enabling machines to make sense of the large amounts of infrastructure data produced across the asset lifecycle, large volumes of data are not machine readable, not interoperable, and not structured at all.