The International Initiative for a Sustainable Built Environment

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 will permit 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 will be 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.

The number and range of documents held will, of course, depend on the extent of cooperation we elicit from individuals, and especially from participating organizations. IiSBE already has 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 are expected from a broad range of European organizations soon.

The attached site map shows the structure that has been established and which is guiding development of the work.

If you are an individual or an organization with high-quality documents relating to sustainable building that you are willing to share with the broad range of iiSBE users, we urge you to get in touch with us. You will benefit from having a wider exposure of your work and from the feedback on the relevance and quality of your document that we will obtain from users.