Crosswalk: A New Way to Connect Construction Data
For almost 80 years, CSI has been delivering the standards and tools to move the industry forward. One year after its first introduction, we’re proud to celebrate Crosswalk as the next step in our evolution as a foundational industry partner.
CSI has been on the forefront of providing the tools specifiers and the construction industry need to manage complexity in projects:
· The evolution of MasterForma from CSI’s beginning in the 1940’s
· The 1970’s introduction of UniFormat for estimating and accounting
· The early 2000’s development of OmniClass to expand standards across workflows
· The 2020 launch of the Crosswalk API
Each of these developments was a response to changes in the industry, as well as a look forward to where we are all going as architecture, engineering and construction continue to grow more sophisticated.
From the first written plans for cathedrals in the middle ages to Frank Gehry’s use of CATIA to design wholly new building shapes, new technologies have been able to unlock new possibilities and unleash ever higher levels of creativity and execution. These past few years have seen an exciting wave of technologies across the building cycle, from new design products to specifying software to estimating and project management software. We stand at the beginning of a new age in the construction industry.
Introducing Crosswalk
In May of 2020, CSI put in place a key element of this new age by creating the first fully digital standards offering, available to all software and IT users as an enterprise-class API. This means that MasterFormat and other key standards that are such a part of the construction industry’s success will now be flawlessly and readily available in all of the software used by construction, regardless of the phase of construction.
As an ingredient into other software offerings, CSI has continued our tradition of supporting the whole industry – our API is available for everyone from startups to the largest players. The power and flexibility Crosswalk provides has been brought to market for everything from building products to estimating to design software, and we’re seeing ever more innovative use of the capabilities as Crosswalk continues to be integrated.
Groundbreaking translations between standards
To make the standards even more useful, Crosswalk is engineered to provide translations between standards, so that data organized by MasterFormat can seamlessly be translated into UniFormat, or OmniClass. This groundbreaking capability opens up even more possibilities, as we create a ‘data backbone’ for the construction process – allowing project data to flow between phases as easily as clicking a button.
No more tedious translation between MasterFormat and UniClass for estimating. No more looking up which OmniClass number a given UniFormat title might be. Crosswalk makes those translations a simple API call away.
The Future of Construction Data
Across the industry, more and more attention is being paid to construction data ? how we created it, use it, analyze it, and communicate it. A major hurdle has always been connecting data across systems and standards. Now, Crosswalk has reduced that hurdle to make data as freely interchangeable as possible.
For more information or a demo, visit https://www.crosswalk.biz .