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Building industry professionals gather to pledge commitment to interoperability
By Deborah Snoonian, P.E.

In late April, more than 30 industry associations, professional organizations, government agencies, and software companies assembled at the AIA’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., to explore opportunities to promote the adoption of open standards for digital data exchange in the design and construction community. By the end of the meeting, each attendee had signed a pledge to work across organizational boundaries toward the so-far-elusive goal of interoperability—in which hardware and software made by different vendors work together seamlessly, so that users in disparate groups can exchange digital design information effortlessly throughout the life of building and design projects. Achieving this goal, industry leaders say, will allow buildings to be erected faster and cheaper, as well as operated more effectively and efficiently.

The gathering differed from past efforts in that organizers emphasized what the participating groups could do as a whole to promote open standards and interoperability, instead of focusing on individual efforts by a single group or company in particular. “These groups are competing within a small community: No one gets sufficient funding or attention to be effective. And up to now, efforts to develop standards have been fragmented and uncoordinated, and the value of interoperability has not been effectively ‘sold’ to the professional user community,” says of one of the conference’s organizers, Jonathan Cohen, FAIA, the former head of the AIA’s Technology in Architectural Practice Committee (TAP).

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Perhaps the most significant outcome of the meeting was an agreement to establish a Web site, www.building-connections.org, to serve as a “one-stop” information source about interoperability for building professionals, including case studies and progress updates on achieving open standards. The site’s content will be provided voluntarily by the organizations that attended the congress; it will be launched later this year.

To avoid duplication of effort, two disparate groups that have been working to develop open standards agreed to coordinate their efforts—the National Institute of Building Science (NIBS) and the Open Standards Consortium for Real Estate (OSCRE), a group begun in 2000 by private-sector managers for Cisco, Intel, and other technology companies.

The group will meet again in early June to set forth a more detailed agenda for collaboration.

Deborah Snoonian, P.E.