Cloister to COBie: Structuring seven centuries of heritage data

Can a single repair to a 700-year-old cloister change how a national institution manages its data?

Join UK Parliament and Donald Insall Associates for the story of how a small masonry repair at St Stephen’s Cloister Court – part of the Palace of Westminster, and home to one of the oldest surviving fragments of the estate – became the test case for turning centuries of narrative heritage information into structured, reusable asset data.

Hear directly from Catharine Dass, Client Architect at UK Parliament, on the gap she identified in existing BIM classification systems, and from Gwyn Roberts, Head of Digital Delivery at Donald Insall Associates, on how that gap was closed in practice – right down to the real repair data that ended up shaping Parliament’s own information governance framework.

This is a genuine, evidenced case study – not a technology showcase – covering what worked, what stayed deliberately simple, and how the same approach is now being scaled from a single trial bay to an eight-year restoration elsewhere on the estate.

A rare chance to hear both client and delivery perspectives from one of the UK’s most significant heritage sites.