I returned from my hike near Zagora in the Sahara desert in Morocco.
I was welcomed back by two happy news items, or 双 喜 临 门, as the Chinese might say; "two happy events came to my door": during my absence, my presentation proposal for the internal Autodesk Technical Summit 2014 on a more generic cloud-based Revit BIM editor was accepted, and my first grandchild was born:
Before getting to those, here are some quick impressions of the beauty to be encountered in the desert:
I spent every night outside under the wonderfully clear sky, learned to recognise several new (to me) star constellations, and had a view of the waxing moon crescent unlike any I ever previously saw:
This was taken with a completely normal run-of-the mill camera. I was even able to zoom in with it far enough to recognise some moon surface details in the shaded part of the orb:
After the ten-day desert hike, we spent a few days in the Atlas Mountains.
One of the many friendly people we met was the Koran teacher in a village that will very soon be inundated due to a new water dam:
If this title reminds you of something, you are perfectly correct: the topic of my presentation for the Technical Summit 2013 was cloud-based round-trip 2D Revit model editing on any mobile device using server-side scripting, CouchDB and SVG.
My new proposal is a more generic reimplementation closer targeting real-world application needs:
A complete generic cloud-based graphical and non-graphical 2D Revit BIM editor. It stores 2D plan view graphics and non-graphical data from a Revit building information model (BIM) in a NoSQL cloud database, implements a fully generic and completely portable editor for both graphical and non-graphical BIM information on any mobile device and supports full round-trip editing with real-time updates from the mobile device through the cloud database to the BIM. This includes the implementation of a framework for extracting and managing arbitrary data from BIM element properties and parameters, storing it in JSON format in a NoSQL cloud database, displaying it to the user in a flexible manner, providing editing facilities, updating the cloud database from modifications on the mobile device and synchronising the BIM model with the cloud database in real-time. This is a continuation of my TS 2013 project, a cloud-based round-trip real-time of a simplified 2D view with no support for non-graphical metadata. My TS 2014 proposal is to reimplement the whole application from scratch, taking additional real-world requirements from external application developers into account to implement a powerful, flexible, generic tool that will be reused by external developers and significantly expand, enhance and simplify their work to grow the cloud-based Autodesk ecosystem.
Here is a suggested workflow that I may or may not be able to implement in time:
This has a the following important advantages over the current simplified 2D room editor:
Wish me luck getting all of this up and running in time.
I look forward to sharing my progress with you.
The second happy item of news is a new little Tammik, my first grandchild, Nora Sophie, daughter of my eldest daughter Lina, 29:
