home pageThe Big Picture, part 4by Sheldon Wolfe, RA, CSI, CCS, CCCA |
OCCS and MasterFormat |
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Let's step back for a moment and look at one of the big problems with any organizing system for construction products and services. It's something that is so common that we don't even see it, yet it is responsible for the difficulty we have in creating a consistent system. In the world of biology, there are many illustrations that explain the relationships of animals and plants. Each of them looks like a tree, and each of them shows how any particular organism is related to others above, below, and next to it. For example, there is a large group called mammals, a subset of which is primates, a group that includes apes, and humans, and so on. (This isn't a scientific discussion, so don't write to explain the fine details!) Regardless of where you look on the tree, it is easy to see how organisms are related. This makes it easy to create a system that describes each organism's location and characteristics by a single name; this is a hierarchical system. The creators of MasterFormat produced a system that appears to be hierarchical, but is not. If we consider windows as a group, it is easy to see that MasterFormat is not truly hierarchical. The next lower level suggests that four types of metal windows, wood windows, plastic windows, composite windows, and special function windows are equivalent subsets of windows. Clearly, steel, bronze, aluminum, and stainless steel windows should be subsets of metal windows. Furthermore, a group of windows defined by function cannot be equivalent to a group defined by material, as some items will appear in both groups. Another example of the problem is the "composite window" - is it a wood window with an applied cladding material? Or is it a window formed of a composite material? Is a window with a wood interior and an aluminum exterior a subset of wood windows or of metal windows? If construction products and procedures were truly hierarchical, creation of a consistent organization system would be trivial. It would be obvious that composite windows were a subset of windows in general, and that only one type of window fit that definition. The problem we face is that there is no obvious and pervasive hierarchy. Thus we have to deal with wood floors, which might be placed in Division 6 as wood products, or Division 9 as finish products. Or with Andersen Renewal windows, which might be wood products, wood windows, composite windows, or clad windows. The bottom line is this: A construction classification system is not a true hierarchy, and inconsistencies within and between categories are inescapable. Someone will have to assign each item to a single group, even though it might logically be placed in any one of several groups. Since that is the case, it would make sense for any new system to be compatible with successful existing systems as much as possible. At the same time, a new system should address shortcomings of existing systems, so some change is to be expected. Next month: An interesting proposal © 2001 Sheldon Wolfe, RA, CSI,
CCS, CCCA, swolfe@bwbr.com |
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