Thursday saw the announcement of the Construction Open Software Alliance, a group that endorses agcXML as its standard of choice to achieve its goal of increasing interoperability between construction software applications. All of this despite the fact that agcXML has largely been stagnant since it was released in 2007. In fact it’s seen no further development since then and still sits at version 0.6.
That should change in a big way soon and on Friday, conference attendees were treated to an update on how current development of agcXML is going from Christian Berger of Burger consulting.
“Right now IT managers are doing what we call point-to-point integration,” Burger said describing that as a method of manually mapping data from one application to another in order to transfer data between the two. “In the world of XML, as we move forward, you won’t have to do that.”
The original push behind agcXML, and it’s still a big component, is to make these software applications less of a hassle so more contractors will move away from transferring data through paper and Excel spreadsheets.
Burger said the team behind agcXML is working on standardized “schema” that software developers can build into their applications that would allow those applications to easily tranfer data to others. He gave the example of timecards saying there would be a schema for employee name or ID number, hours and so forth.
“We’re just deciding on the schema and after that’s done, all the publishers in the community can write their programs that deliver timecards with that same standard,” Burger said. “We’re essentially reducing the cost of maintaining integration.”
