On April 30, 2004, over 30 organizations from all corners of the building industry gathered in the boardroom of the American Institute of Architects for Building Connections: The 1st Congress on Digital Collaboration in the Building Industry. This was a coordination summit among the leading building industry associations, government agencies, software companies, and academic institutions, whose purpose was to make connections, harmonize overlapping or competing efforts, and find areas of common ground and opportunities for collaboration. Participants discussed strategies to create a broader constituency and awareness of the value of interoperability and open standards for data exchange. The Congress also showcased success stories (CIS/2 and the PISCES Standard) in data exchange standards devlopment and adoption, defined as standards that have achieved acceptance and are being used by target business communities.

Background:

Many groups within the building industry are working on a common issue: how can we agree on standards for data exchange so that real collaboration can occur throughout our fragmented industry? These groups are competing within a small community: No one gets sufficient funding or attention to be effective. And none has the funding to market the message to the professional user communities so that the value of interoperability becomes widely understood.

Now that the potential of intelligent building modeling is recognized as a means to integrate design, construction, and operations, we must have open, non-proprietary standards to enable software interoperability across platforms, disciplines and applications. We believe that interoperability is critical to process improvement throughout the building industry. Up to now, efforts to develop standards have themselves been fragmented and uncoordinated, and the value of interoperability has not been effectively “sold” to stakeholders.

Here were some of the highlights of the meeting:

• OSCRE and NIBS announced they will formally coordinate their activities in standards development.
  
• Attendees agreed to contribute to a matrix of organizations and their data exchange standards activities as content for the soon-to-be-launched building-connections.org Web site.
  
• FIATECH made the commitment to turn over portions of its Web site on Data Standards and Open Systems to building-connections.org provided a permanent funding scheme for site maintenance is established.
  
• Norbert Young proposed to meet again in Chicago in early June after a “discovery period” in which each organization will acquire understanding of its peers.

Participants were asked to take The Interoperability Pledge:

• We will respect the investment of our colleagues by actively finding ways to avoid duplication of efforts and by informing each other whenever new projects are initiated.
  
• We will require our technical working groups to interact with each other on related efforts.
  
• We will provide regular updates of our activities to be posted on
  building-connections.org
  
• We will communicate in an open forum on an ongoing basis, including regular face-to-face meetings beginning with this Congress hosted by AIA.

Go to the presentations and background materials