Building & Land Development Specification (BLDS)
| Item | Description |
|---|---|
| Current Status | Still evolving, limited adoption |
| Version Number | 1.2 |
| Key Contacts | https://github.com/open-data-standards/permitdata.org/graphs/contributors |
| Implementing Agencies | |
| Documentation | https://github.com/open-data-standards/permitdata.org |
| Founding/Sponsoring Organizations | Joint effort led by Accela, including BuildFax, Buildingeye, CivicInsight, DR-i-VE Decisions, SiteCompli, Socrata, and Zillow |
Background
The Building & Land Development Specification (BLDS) provides a standard for building and construction permit data for municipalities and counties. BLDS was created by a cooperative partnership between civic tech organizations and stakeholders in the Housing and Real Estate Sector of the Open Data Network including Accela, BuildFax, Buildingeye, CivicInsight, DR-i-VE Decisions, SiteCompli, Socrata, and Zillow. The standard was developed to provide better data flow between public sector data producers to citizens, software developers, and application users.
Analysis
The ongoing development of the BLDS standard is now supported by about 20 partners. At least twelve U.S. cities or counties have adopted the standard and are listed as sample data sets on the BLDS website. The BLDS standard outlines a format for permit data that increases the number of practical use cases for the data by adding structure. However, the number of additional use cases is also dependent on the number of locations that adopt this standard.