ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the Finnish, RATAS national building model project, an early effort to resolve the basic problems of a national building core model. It also reviews Part 106 and the Building Core Construction Model (BCCM). The building product model framework defined in 1987 is the original RATAS model. The RATAS team initially adopted the entity-relationship modeling language, extended to include inheritance. Specific aggregations of attributes in RATAS are defined as classes. The specifications for the RATAS product domain model are similar to the typical object-oriented definitions used in many other conceptual models of products. The RATAS work also pointed out the need for a building framework model and began to identify semantic relations needed to define construction-oriented building models. The BCCM specification focuses on definition of an exchange framework, not support for any particular application protocol. The BCCM was approved as a STEP activity in late 1994 and was identified as Part 106.
