Treegram case study · BIM interoperability
Building a BIM interoperability product across CAD, 3D and the web.
As a founding engineer at Treegram, I worked across a BIM software platform designed to make fragmented model data usable through desktop tools, web interfaces and specialist automation.
- Role
- Founding engineer
- Domain
- BIM · CAD · Construction technology
- Product surface
- Native · Web · Scripting
01 / The challenge
The problem was not another 3D viewer.
Architecture, engineering and construction teams describe the same building through different tools, schemas and professional vocabularies. Collaboration breaks when model information cannot move cleanly between those boundaries or be reshaped for the decision at hand.
Treegram’s product challenge was to make BIM data inspectable and actionable without forcing every participant into one authoring environment. That meant connecting large native models, browser access, CAD and BIM integrations, and repeatable checks created around real construction workflows.
02 / Product architecture
One product surface, three kinds of leverage.
The work joined model-data foundations to interfaces and automation. Each layer solved a different part of the collaboration problem.
A usable model-data layer
Read, organise and filter model information so teams could inspect data, create business-specific views and feed downstream tools instead of treating a BIM file as a sealed object.
Native and browser interfaces
A native DirectX viewer supported large-model workflows while a WebGL viewer made project information available in the browser. Integrations covered tools including Digital Project, 3DEXPERIENCE, AutoCAD, Revit and Rhino.
Automation owned by specialists
TreegramScripts exposed measurements, clash detection and repeatable model operations as scripts, letting engineers turn domain rules into workflows they could run again as models changed.
03 / Public research
Treating BIM queries as collaboration building blocks.
The engineering problem also became a research question. The peer-reviewed paper “A query-based framework to improve BIM multi-domain collaboration” examines trade-specific semantics, heterogeneous data schemas and low digital cooperation as barriers to multidisciplinary BIM work.
The paper proposes BIM queries as reusable collaborative building blocks. It was co-authored with Léa Sattler, Samir Lamouri, Robert Pellerin, Virginie Fortineau and Thomas Maigne, and published in Enterprise Information Systems after acceptance in 2020.
Read the peer-reviewed paper04 / Engineering lessons
What I carried into later enterprise products.
Interoperability is a product boundary.
A connector is not enough. Useful interoperability preserves meaning and presents the right slice of information for each professional decision.
Performance determines who can participate.
Large models, native authoring tools and browsers impose different constraints. Architecture must respect each environment rather than hide every workflow behind one interface.
Domain experts need controlled leverage.
Scripting and reusable queries become valuable when specialists can express checks and transformations without surrendering governance, repeatability or traceability.
05 / Sources
Public evidence behind this account.
These independent and first-party sources document the research, public recognition and current product domain. No private client data is used here.