Unique Building Identification
City agencies, commercial real estate, and others keep track of a numerous amount of building data. City agencies across the United States developed local building identification (ID) numbering systems primarily for tax properties and building permits, but these local systems are inadequate for the rising needs of connecting building attributes to data points across a variety of sources.
- Project Overview (Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy)
- GitHub Repository
- UBID Apps and Examples Website
Market Needs
As public and private entities collaborate to gain a better understanding of building assets through a variety of tools and services, a major obstacle presents itself across the board: the difficulty of joining various types of data from disparate sources in a single location. Typically, that effort is based solely on address matching strategies—an outdated strategy which often yields low match rates and leaves significant portions of the building stock unaccounted for across multiple data sources.
Value Proposition
A unique identification system for buildings will provide a standardized framework under which a unifying field is used to match building data from various sources to a single object. It will facilitate data management and sharing by reducing the risk of mismatching or duplicating building data, and it will ease the burden of data exchange.