Initially, the classifier was developed

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History of development
In 1973, Hanscomb Associates (a costing and budgeting consultant) developed a system called MASTERCOST for the American Institute of Architects (AIA). At the same time, the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA), responsible for government buildings, was also developing its own system. The two organizations decided to join forces and developed a unified framework, and the AIA and GSA agreed on a system called UNIFORMAT. The AIA incorporated it into its construction management practices, and the GSA incorporated it into its project evaluation requirements.

In 1989, ASTM International began developing a standard for classifying building elements based on UNIFORMAT. It was renamed UNIFORMAT II. In 1995, the Construction Specifications Institute (CSI) and Construction phone number in vietnam Specifications Canada (CSC) began revising Uniformat. UniFormat is now a trademark of CSI and CSC and was last published in 2010.

for estimators to plan costs for a project in a certain structure and then close them.

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Then the Uniformat classification system was included in the general system of classification tables - OmniClass. On its basis, table 21 of OmniClass - the industry construction classifier in the USA - was made. This table is called Elements.

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Currently there are 2 more tables: Masterformat (23 Omniclass table - Products) and 22 OmniClass table - Work Results.

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Masterformat is used for structuring the budget at the construction stage and a detailed calendar schedule.

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Work Results — used to structure types of work into groups, for example, to code regulatory documents on work execution and quality control (called specifications in the US). Useful for quickly searching and organizing a catalog of documents such as our GOSTs for construction processes.

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There are similar tables in other classifiers, responsible for certain data sections.

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What is the Uniformat classifier used for in the world?
Uniformat is used to classify BIM model elements. Its default code is offered to be selected in the Assembly code parameter in Revit. In further tasks on collecting volumes or mapping with a calendar-network schedule, even if a more detailed breakdown is required, a single structure at the top level helps significantly. Order is always better than its absence, and with any classifier, it can often be automatically converted to another.

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The file "UNIFORMAT 2015 RU.txt" for loading into Revit is located at the link https://sgnl.pro/uniformat

Uniformat is also used in various international companies for structuring types of work in the budget and schedule, creating the top level (up to 3-4) of WBS (work breakdown structure) for building construction projects. At the same time, items at lower levels are supposed to be added from other classifiers, as if putting Uniformat items into a folder.

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For example, there are examples of maintaining a budget in the Uniformat structure at early stages, and at later stages, during the construction phase, expanding the Uniformat classifier, inserting a position from Masterformat into each position.

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In other cases, mapping (comparison) of positions occurs to link budgets compiled using the Uniformat and Masterformat structures.

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In Russia, the equivalent is a list of local cost estimates for a consolidated cost estimate or a budget structure and calendar-network schedule adopted within companies.

In any case, using a single classifier to break down all budgets of a company (or even an industry) is convenient because it allows you to easily compare costs between projects for identical cost items. This helps track real price changes and update rates for further calculations.

Uniformat is used to estimate the cost of an object at the early stages of design, when each assembly has its own key volume parameter (for example, from the area of ​​the premises, the volume of concrete, the area of ​​the facades), on which the entire cost of the assembly is calculated, for a preliminary budget calculation.

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This calculation method is more accurate than the calculation based on the total area or productivity of the facility, as in the Soviet methods currently used in the Russian Federation. But, of course, the accuracy is lower than the estimate calculation after stage P.

Thus, this calculation does not allow replacing the primary (from the planned area or productivity) and estimated, but is useful for a more accurate assessment after the pre-project (concept stage), because it can highlight the specifics of the project, which can lead to an increase in price relative to the primary calculation. It is better to identify such things at early stages, so as not to find out that you are not within the budget, after the development and calculation of stage P, six months later, which simply leads to freezing the project.

It is also proposed to use the classifier in some methodological recommendations for describing a project, forming the structure of the technical specifications for design and organizing the structure of storing technical documentation on a project.

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In the world, the USA and Europe, it is common practice that independent commercial companies maintain their own price reference databases for different regions and sell subscriptions to them to companies (including government agencies and state-owned companies) that need to calculate estimates. Sometimes these reference books are also structured in Uniformat encoding or have additional parameters for comparison with it. Specifications for work performance standards can also be maintained in this structure. This allows those interested to quickly find the required prices and documents.

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Conclusions
Why UNIFORMAT?
Uniformat is a good example of how to make a construction industry classifier. It is universal, understandable, allows you to decompose data according to the hierarchy by functional feature, by assemblies of building structures and engineering systems, elements. On its basis, commercial departments and planning departments create work breakdown structures (WBS) within their companies around the world.

The translation of this format will allow standardizing the work of developers in BIM, will allow us all to move forward in terms of automated receipt of volumes from the BIM model and linking it with the project budget and schedule. Even if not applied head-on, then used for revision, expansion of their own, as well as organizing the mapping of their classifiers with foreign ones.

Why not KSI?
At the moment, the state offers market participants to use KSI. However, this classifier has a number of unclosed points (further we will talk about tables 4, 5 and 6, which are proposed to be used for BIM).

Facet classification is primarily intended to automate the generation of a complete code for any element that would describe its parameters, behavior, and purpose.

This is its main benefit.

In return, it requires strict adherence to a number of principles, without which its use will become impossible or extremely difficult. Namely:

Deep analysis and conflict elimination between facet tables
Significant simplification of the individual tables themselves
And most importantly, a detailed methodology and algorithms, tools for automated analysis and code generation. Manual codification is almost impossible or impractical here.
In KSI, all these problems are not solved. We have a complex system of subordination of tables and codes, the presence of conflicts in them, the absence of a step-by-step methodology for codification in the model with examples, analysis of particular cases, the lack of understanding of how to automatically assign it in models (and doing it manually is extremely difficult) and a host of other problems.

As a result, the threshold for entry into the process of using the KSI is so high that this process becomes painful, unprofitable and costly in terms of effort, time, economic benefit and feasibility.

This is compounded by the incomprehensible naming of class groups and a strange way of forming a summary code with special characters (++, -, =), which complicates work in Excel or other spreadsheet editors, in which mappings and structure refinement should ideally be carried out.