CANspec: Canada's building product registry, built with the people who need it.
Specifiers, builders and suppliers had no single source of truth for what is made, approved and available in Canada. We built one with BIMworkshop Inc., developed in collaboration with and funded in part by Housing, Infrastructure and Communities Canada. It now holds more than 14,000 Canadian companies, searchable by what their products are and do.
You could only find a Canadian product if you already knew its name.
Specification does not start with a brand. It starts with a requirement: a fire rating, an R-value, a dimension, a certification. Traditional product search runs on brand names and keywords, so smaller and regional Canadian manufacturers stayed invisible, and buyers defaulted to the brands they already knew.
As federal policy put more weight on Canadian-made products in housing and construction, the gap became a national one. There was no comprehensive, attribute-based way to find domestic building products.
Attribute-based search on a taxonomy built for Canadian construction.
CANspec runs on Nordic-Class, a proprietary four-level classification mapped to OmniClass and purpose-built for Canadian construction rather than adapted from a foreign standard. Thousands of distinct product types and their defining attributes sit in one consistent framework, so a user can move from a requirement straight to the companies whose products satisfy it.
The registry side follows a simple model: every company is registered, can verify and enrich its own listing, and is recognised as part of Canada's building product supply chain. That levels the field for a manufacturer with a strong product and no advertising budget.
- AI-assisted classification maps every company listing to the four-level taxonomy, cutting manual classification at onboarding
- Data enrichment pulls from multiple sources and uses AI to verify, deduplicate and surface contact details, product ranges, certifications and geographic reach
- An AI quality assurance pipeline flags inconsistencies, missing attributes and likely misclassifications before they reach the live registry
- Semantic search understands performance requirement, application and material, not just matching strings
- Clear definitions of Product of Canada (98 percent of production cost domestic) and Made in Canada (51 percent, with a qualifying statement), following the Competition Bureau guidelines, built into the platform
Four levels, from a category to an attribute.
Nordic-Class is what makes attribute search possible. Follow a path down the four levels to see where a requirement lands.
A national resource with a public partner.
CANspec was developed in collaboration with, and funded in part by, Housing, Infrastructure and Communities Canada, and is operated by BIMworkshop Inc.. We shaped the product, built the platform and the AI pipelines, and stayed on to run it: onboarding companies, tuning classification, and growing the registry in both official languages.
The registry is free for companies to claim and verify a listing, and open to architects, engineers, contractors and procurement teams to search.
Data products live or die on the QA pipeline.
Fourteen thousand company records classified by AI is only useful if the errors are caught before anyone sees them. Building the review pipeline as a product feature rather than an internal script is the reason the registry can keep scaling without the data going soft.
What it adds up to.
See it for yourself.
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