The importance of building open foundations
by Paul Wilkinson and Nick Nisbet1
Common approaches to industry challenges have often been developed through years of professional endeavour. Widely shared foundations – such as classification systems – have become business-critical for thousands of organisations and their employees, and it is important that we recognise the value they create when maintained as open standards.
Around the world, construction industry professionals have often tackled similar challenges by devising similar solutions which have been moulded to their local geographies. Take, for example, classification systems, which sit at the heart of specification writing.
In Europe, one of the earliest classification systems was CI/SfB (Construction Indexing/ Samarbetskommittén för Byggnadsfrågor), a classification system originally developed in Sweden in the 1950s and introduced into the UK by the RIBA in 1961. CI/SfB was eventually superseded in the UK by Uniclass, first published in 1997, with the latest iteration released in April 2015 and regularly updated ever since.
In parallel, across the Atlantic, the US’s Construction Specifications Institute (CSI, founded in 1948) and Construction Specifications Canada (CSC, founded in 1954) both developed numbering systems to organise specifications in the 1960s. In 1972, the two systems were merged and from 1978 became known as MasterFormat. This underpins a range of other US and Canadian information specification approaches used across government and industry, and is also used by manufacturers and design teams.
Like Uniclass in the UK, MasterFormat within OmniClass provides a ‘common vocabulary’ enabling consistency and coherence when pulling sections from different sources. And like Uniclass, MasterFormat and OmniClass are the cumulative result of thousands of professionals providing thousands of hours of effort and expertise over many years to collaboratively create common standards.
Recent unrest about MasterFormat and OmniClass
Recently, CSI began to change how it distributed MasterFormat. In February 2026, it announced the rollout of “The Construction Standard” (a digital-only platform – CSI Dynamic Standards, CDS) to control licensing and protect its MasterFormat (now in a 2026 edition), OmniClass (the direct equivalent of Uniclass) and UniFormat trademarks. Hard copy versions of the products were also discontinued, and PDFs were no longer available (marked as ‘sold out’).
The move has faced significant industry pushback due to new licensing fees and concerns about privatising previously public-use standards. North American industry professionals are upset that the new licensing fees (starting at US$699/yr for firms with under US$2m revenue) are imposed on all entities who use MasterFormat in any way: designers, construction product manufacturers, contractors, subcontractors, owners, building managers, etc.
An annual firm subscription to CDS is now the only way a firm whose employees do not all own individual hardcopies of MasterFormat can comply with licensing moving forward. Individuals can no longer buy the book to obtain a license to use the numbering system. CDS is the only option.
Why this should not happen in the UK
Until 2013, Uniclass development was managed by the Construction Project Information Committee (CPIC) led by several professional bodies. In 2014, the Technology Strategy Board (now Innovate UK), on behalf of the UK Government, managed a contract competition to develop a unified multi-disciplinary digital plan of work using Uniclass. In September 2014, an NBS-led team incorporating experts from across UK industry won a £1m TSB contract to develop a free-to-use ‘Digital Toolkit for BIM’ including the digital plan of work and the classification system. This was launched in April 2015,
Uniclass 2015 continues to be regularly updated by NBS (now part of the global construction technology company Hubexo), and it asserts “Uniclass is a free service. All Uniclass tables are available to download and use completely free of charge.” Moreoever, it says: “Uniclass is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-ND 4.0) licence, allowing users and organizations to share and apply the tables on any kind of personal or commercial project.”
So, just as they were when managed by CPIC, Uniclass tables remain openly accessible. Information by and about CPIC has also been archived on the free-to-use DesigningBuildings website. And, due to this long-term openness, Uniclass has become firmly embedded in project and long-term asset management in the UK and beyond.
Nima, through activities like the Information Management Initiative (IMI), is looking to maintain open, industry-wide approaches that all businesses can use as foundations for their work. Uniclass is a key part of those foundations with increasing interest and use around the world.
The CSI situation in North America is a cautionary tale of what can happen when restrictions are suddenly applied to widely used common approaches. From within the nima community, we applaud NBS for maintaining Uniclass as an important free service – a key to better communication within our industry.
(Title image: Cinthia Cypriano, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons)
- Paul Wilkinson and Nick NIsbet are both members of the nima think tank, the GIIG. ↩︎
