Building & Land Development Specification (BLDS)

Assessment

• Open License Yes

• Transferable to Other Jurisdictions Yes

  The fields for the specification are intentionally few and broad so that the standard may be applied across jurisdictions more easily. Creators of the standard struggled with compromising between granular level data (good for consumers) and more universal data the could applied over a wider range of jurisdictions. Meant to be adopted by large and small cities across the east and west coasts

• Stakeholder Participation Yes

  Collaborative effort by tech. companies, government, and stakeholder groups

• Consensus-Based Governance Yes

  Standard includes an Issue tracker on the GitHub repository. It is also possible to contribute sample datasets, to 'pull requests' on GitHub, to post thoughts and advice in a provided discussion forum, and access their mailing list

• Extensions No

• Human Readable Yes

  Specification uses metadata, field identifiers and semantics

• Machine Readable Yes

  Standard consists of CSV files saved as basic, separated .txt files. These are NOT variables in a program language or database engine. However, they still adhere to database normalization assuming data will be fed into RDSM. This multi-file database structure ought to be normalized. CSV file names are as follows: publication_info.csv, permits.csv, permits_history.csv, contractors.csv, permit_contractopr.csv, inspections.csv. Fields for each dataset are either required, recommended, or optional

• Requires Up-To-Date / Real-Time Data No

  Standard employs an optional permit status change dataset to track permit data over time

• Metadata Yes

  Standard requires publication_info.csv file. This acts as a source of information about the data publisher, version of standard, data being published... etc