ARCOM has launched a public beta of Specifications.org, a new vertical organic search destination for information for construction specifications.
Specifications.org is built around a curating and crowdsourcing model with the goals of making this information better organized for architects, engineers, specifiers, and other building and construction professionals, as well as providing more focused, accurate results than generic search engines. Specifications.org will also provide the ability to launch several aggressive new technologies designed to organize the vast array of unstructured specification data and resources on the web to make certain project functions easier and more efficient.
The beta site has a strong “backbone” of traditional search and index services that include innovative search results focused on specifications, product data, standards and discussion forums collected from relevant websites around the internet. The site also provides a touch point to ARCOM’s new knowledge-base initiative focusing on specification-related articles from industry organizations and building product manufacturers.
“ARCOM is ‘seeding’ this beta version of the specifications.org platform, but with the specifier tools to come, we expect future growth to be driven by organizations, building product manufacturers and individual specifiers,” says Matthew Johnson, ARCOM project manager of Specifications.org. “ARCOM believes the largely static, traditional database driven information site has really reached its practical limits. We are excited to be in the forefront of the move to organize and curate the always evolving unstructured data that exists on the web and make it more useful to specifiers.”
ARCOM has also established strategic alliances with several industry organizations that will provide knowledge-based content and function in an “expert” role in assisting specifiers making informed decisions about what to include in a project as product-level decision are made.