The testbed aims to foster business transformation as defined in the United States National Building Information Modeling Standard, Part 1 (NBIMS) with technology for interoperability involving intelligent building models with 3D geometric capabilities. Business and communications, quantity take-off for cost estimating, and energy analysis are considered as they relate to planning and design for a capital facility. These three topic areas were selected by the Sponsors to focus attention on defining workable information solutions and services for information visualization and sharing.

The RFQ/CFP is available at http://www.opengeospatial.org/projects/initiatives/aecoo-1rfq.
Responses are due by May 30, 2008.

All organizations and individuals with expertise in the building information management field are encouraged to review and respond to the RFQ / CFP. Limited cost-sharing funding is available to help offset engineering costs incurred by participants in support of this effort.

Effective management of buildings and other capital facilities increasingly requires information exchange among all disciplines and professions that have a stake in the design, construction and operation of those facilities. Numerous information exchange approaches have been developed independently within the community. Understanding how particular exchanges and related technology might best support AECOO end-to-end business practices is a high priority for the industry.

The buildingSMART alliance and OGC decided that OGC's Interoperability Program is the right mechanism to encourage broad international participation in solving well-defined sets of AECOO community problems; facilitating cooperation among AECOO standards bodies; and achieving results no group could achieve alone.

The AECOO Testbed is an Interoperability Initiative that features a global, hands-on and collaborative rapid prototyping program designed to develop and deliver proven candidate standards into OGC's, NBIM's and buildingSMART International's specification programs where they are formalized for release as open standards. In Interoperability Initiatives, teams of technology providers and users collaborate to solve specific interoperability problems posed by the Initiatives' sponsors. Interoperability Initiatives can be test beds, pilot projects, or interoperability experiments, all designed to encourage rapid development, testing, validation and adoption of open, consensus based standards.

buildingSMART International and its National Chapters and the National Institute of Building Sciences (NIBS) including its buildingSMART alliance and National Building Information Modeling Standard (NBIMS) Project have large roles in the ultimate success of this testbed. It is through these organizations that results of the testbed will be delivered.

The OGC ®  is an international consortium of more than 350 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OpenGIS ®  standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org.

The buildingSMART alliance TM  is a program of the National Institute of Building Sciences. The alliance was established to 1) coordinate the profound constructive changes coming to the fragmented real property industry in North America; 2) be the coordination point for fund raising and uniform marketing of member programs; and 3) provide a centralized process for strategic planning, resource allocation and decision making for the member programs. Our collective goal is open interoperability and full lifecycle implementation of building information models. The focus is to guarantee lowest overall cost, optimum sustainability, energy conservation and environmental stewardship to protect the earth's ecosystem. Visit the buildingSMART alliance website at http://www.buildingsmartalliance.org.