Is anyone out there familiar with any building materials APIs that are publicly available? I’d like to develop an extension to help do takeoff cost estimating based on material costs from the market. I’ve looked into the Home Depot and Lowes (in the US) and they have API’s, but they seem to be limited to their development partners, and I’m not one.
That would be a uselful plugin for Sketchup.
Not sure about the US but in the UK you could get an e-price book (search RICS Price books) and try turn this into a dataset. They may have APIs.
You would need some way of classifying the materials in schema system. In the UK, BIM programs are adopting Uniclass.