Building Fact Making - Ten Hundred Words of BIM

The web comic XKCD once set out to describe a Saturn V rocket, the vessel which took men to the moon and back, using only the one thousand most common words in the English language. As it turned out, even the word "thousand" didn't make the list and thus was born the Ten Hundred Words, or Up Goer Five, approach to explaining complex concepts.

Our industry in general, and BIM in particular, is loaded with daunting, confusing and occasionally incomprehensible jargon. What happens when we try to explain BIM to the uninitiated and apply the Ten Hundred Words principle? Well, for one thing you get Building Fact Making... And perhaps a few laughs.
With that, I present: Building Fact Making.

Building Fact Making is a computer picture of what a building looks like from every direction. It also shows you what the things it is made of are like when they work. A Building Fact Making Place is a shared place for things you know about a building forming a trusted beginning for deciding what to do with a building during its whole life; from earliest idea to when the building falls down.

Every person who helps make the building uses Building Fact Making, from the people who draw it, to the people who build it, and most important the people who own and run the building.

Building Fact Making allows the people who draw the building to share what they draw from every direction with each other much more easily. This saves them from doing things like trying to put two different things in the same place, or calling them different things on different pieces of paper even though they are the same thing, so it means fewer bad things happening. When fewer bad things happen, you can save time and money.

The same thing goes for the people who build the building, because they share their plans of where the things that were drawn will actually get built, they can stay out of each other's way and do fewer bad things that have to be done again. They can also add facts about what was built to the Building Fact Making Place, like who made each piece of the building, what exactly they made, when they put it in place, how long it should work for, how much money it took to buy it, and how to fix it when it breaks.

Then, when the owner gets the Building Fact Making Place, they can make it talk to the computer thing they use to tell them when to fix things that break and have all the facts they need to fix the building over its entire life.