BIMnesia Skema, Inc
June 2025
What Your Models Forgot and Why It
Matters
Rethinking the System of Record in AEC
By Marty Rozmanith, CTO and Co-Founder, Skema
The Limits of the Current BIM System of Record
For decades, AEC firms have relied on BIM tools
like Revit to serve as their system of record—the
authoritative home for the design data that
produces the record drawings in the permit set. But
anyone who has tried to
open a ten-year-old Revit file knows the well-worn hassles and
limitations of that process. At Skema, we believe it's time to shift
to something more robust for leveraging your previous work.
WHAT IS A SYSTEM OF
RECORD IN AEC?
A system of record is the
authoritative source of truth
for a firm’s design data.
Historically, models and
paper drawings, tools like
Revit have served this role
over the last 20 years,
storing design elements in
an ‘object’ model format tied
to permit sets. But over time,
this model grows brittle and
hard to reuse across
projects.
We’ve been quietly working on something different: a new
system of record based not on documents or exports, but on
design knowledge—curated, reusable, and deeply integrated
with your firm’s existing BIM practices. This system lives in what
we call the Skema Design Catalog. It turns your prior projects
into building blocks—semantically rich assemblies that can be
reused, adapted, and reassembled with modern computational
tools. It’s a fundamentally different approach than simply storing
BIM data. It's about curating design intelligence.
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June 2025
Why Design Catalogs Matter to Your Practice
Skema’s Design Catalogs transform your firm’s trusted assemblies into curated, searchable
building blocks—ready to adapt, remix, and deploy across new projects.
We’ve all heard the complaints: “Our Revit files are a mess.” It's true—BIM data often
resembles a cluttered garage, where even valuable assets are buried in inaccessible
forms. But that doesn’t mean this data is useless. At Skema, we’re developing targeted
machine learning techniques to help firms extract value from their design history. Our
tools identify whole reusable layouts and assemblies
from your past work, forming a searchable, reusable
library of designs ready to deploy.
What’s crucial here is that this isn’t generative AI
hallucinating pictures based on internet training. The
Skema Design Catalog uses your own project data—
authored by your team, proven in practice—and
applies AI only as an assistant to help structure and
curate that knowledge. Your IP stays your IP. We’ve
been vocal about this distinction because, unlike
many software vendors racing to scrape and remix
user-generated content to train opaque models,
Skema is designed to protect your intellectual
property. We don’t ingest your models into some
centralized AI hive mind. We help you build a trusted,
firm-specific knowledge asset.
HOW DESIGN CATALOGS
WORK
• Pulls assemblies from your
past work
• Tags them semantically:
unit types, layout
conditions, etc.
• Makes them reusable
across future projects
• Machine learning assists
with structuring—not
design generation
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June 2025
From Conceptual Design to Production-Grade BIM, Without the Rewrite
With Skema’s integration with Rhino, architects can evolve Rhino designs into constructible BIM
models—without scripting, manual remodeling, or loss of intent.
The idea of toolchains is central to our philosophy. We’ve moved away from the idea of
Skema as a standalone conceptual tool. Today, it’s more like a Swiss Army knife—a
focused, interoperable set of capabilities that work with tools you already use. Our
integrations with SketchUp and Rhino let you stay in familiar environments while
accessing the power of curated BIM data. And there is no need for a team of BIM-
jockeys to then re-enter the data in Revit all along the way, since we have integrated the
approach.
This integration-first approach means you don’t have to relearn your entire workflow.
Skema sits in the middle of the pipeline, enabling higher-quality design outputs without
forcing you to abandon the tools that work for you. The result is a toolchain that’s greater
than the sum of its parts. Think Rhino for expressive geometry, Skema for data-aware
layout and BIM curation, and Revit for final design, documentation and drawing sets.
Each tool does what it does best, and Skema links them together.
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June 2025
Curating Firm Knowledge to Create Best-Fit ‘Tool Chains’
A connected workflow, not a replacement. Skema sits in the middle of your toolchain, linking design tools
like SketchUp, Rhino, and Revit—so each can do what it does best, without data silos or duplication.
Connecting tools is just the start. What really makes a toolchain
powerful is curation—the ability to structure, filter, and reuse your
best design work.
That’s where Skema stands apart. It doesn’t just move data
between Rhino, Revit, and SketchUp—it understands your layouts,
assemblies, and logic. It turns scattered BIM assets into a
purposeful, firm-specific knowledge base that you can actually use.
SKEMA DESIGN CATALOGS
DRIVE A CURATED TOOL
CHAIN
• Smarter reuse of past
designs
• No more remodeling
from scratch
• Trusted design logic,
not random
generative output
Advanced Workflows and Solvers—The Next Frontier
Behind the scenes, we’ve been building an advanced ‘solver architecture’ where you can inject your own
logic into our layout engines. These graph-based engines can automate layout and morph spaces based
on real architectural design data—not just simplified shapes or boxes. And we have been working with
leading AEC firms that are pushing the envelope in modular design and Design for Manufacturing.
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June 2025
Design logic you control. Skema’s graph-based solvers automate layout with real architectural intelligence
—letting you inject firm-specific logic into smart, adaptable design workflow
Together these three legs of the stool—design catalogs, toolchains, and solvers—unlock a new
design workflow—fast, flexible, and grounded in practice.
Not a Platform—A Multiplier
We deliberately avoid calling Skema a platform. Why? Because it is
not our goal to charge firms for access to their own data or impose a
new model standard. Skema isn't trying to replace BIM tools—it's
connecting them with purpose. Skema's role is not to become the
next Revit or Rhino—but to make those tools work better together,
to make your data more usable, and to do it in a way that’s fast to
learn and simple to apply.
Skema is a ‘fast-forward’ button for your project team. Skema is NOT
a collaboration platform even though we are used for collaboration
all the time. Rather, SKEMA is designed to work with whatever
collaboration environment you use today (or tomorrow).
A USER-DRIVEN
APPROACH
This approach is shaped
by feedback from real
users. As one customer
put it: “You’re letting me
reuse what I already know
and already trust.” That’s
the point. We’re not
trying to replace human
expertise. We’re helping
you operationalize it.
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June 2025
Data Ownership, Copyrights and Trust
With Skema, your data, models, and designs stay yours and stay private
There’s a growing concern in the industry about how software vendors are using customer data
to train AI systems. At Skema, we’ve taken a hard stance: your models remain private. Our
machine learning features operate within your own environment, curating—not consuming—
your design history.
This matters.
Your design work isn’t just geometry. It’s judgment, collaboration, negotiation. It’s intellectual
property. And increasingly, it’s your competitive edge. Skema is here to help you protect it—
and put it to work.
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