Sustainable Building Information System

One of iiSBE’s main projects is to develop a major information system, including a major portal website, a database of international R&D materials relating to sustainable building, and mapping of current R&D initiatives being undertaken by existing organizations. Collectively, this work is referred to as the R&D Knowledge project.

The system is designed to include gateways for iiSBE and other organizations, while the information system itself is referred to as the Sustainable Building Information System(SBIS).

SBIS permits users to reach information from three types of sources:

* Documents from individuals and other diverse sources, held in an internal database, and screened for quality by a QA panel.
* Documents authored by participating organizations, held in folders on our site that are accessible by those organizations for insertion, update and removal of documents, all at the discretion of the relevant organization. It is assumed that documents contributed by participating organizations will be pre-screened for quality before they are placed on the site.
* Specific sections or pages of related websites belonging to other organizations.

The heart of the SBIS system is the depth and richness of the search mechanism. All documents are tagged according to an extensive tagging schema that is related to many specialized aspects of sustainable building, including the following:

* Baseline information, including title, author, date, country of origin, document format and size, level of detail and ratings given by previous iiSBE users
* Document relevance to climate zones, urban location types, building types, technical system types, occupancy types, performance focus and stage of the building life cycle.
* Other specialized search parameters will be available for searches of the People and Organization , the Events, the Policies and Programs, the R&D Projects, the Methods & Tools and the Technologies databases.

Alternatively, a simple and more conventional text search facility enables users to make a simplified search.

The number and range of documents held depends, of course, on the extent of cooperation we elicit from individuals, and especially from participating organizations. iiSBE already has had offers of cooperation from the U.S. Department of Energy, Natural Resources Canada, Public Works and Government Services Canada, Novem, the Netherlands energy agency, and CSIR, the South African building research body. Other commitments to share valuable documents have been received from a broad range of European organizations.

SBIS is available at http://sbis.iisbe.org