Many types of construction documents have experienced a slow migration. First from paper-based documentation and storage to digital organization, then cloud-based software, and more recently, open cloud-based platforms and mobile applications. But specification books—those hefty tomes that catalog every detail of a design and its subsequent execution in the field—have remained paper-based, or, at best, have been digitized in the form of isolated files. The data sets have been too large with too many information sources to make for an easy transition to the cloud.
More agile software applications, and state-of-the-art technologies like optical character recognition (OCR), are enabling even these massive compilations to move to the cloud. This means specifications, like other critical construction documents, are now available in real time on the job site—not to mention being more complete and accurate than ever before.
