OTTAWA - The Continental Automated Buildings Association (CABA) and an alliance of leaders from the building automation, HVAC, security, IT, and facility management industries have announced efforts to create guidelines for sharing data and control across facility systems. These guidelines, called Open Building Information Xchange (oBIX), employ XML/Web services to enable open systems capabilities and enhanced operations.

The goal of the alliance is to evolve the oBIX guidelines into a standard protocol for building systems. According to CABA, although not currently an industry-wide standard, the oBIX effort will provide building professionals with such benefits as enterprise-wide facility management and open systems integration based on IT standards.

"The knowledge and control oBIX puts in the hands of facility managers gives the oBIX guidelines the potential to become the standard of choice to unify operating data from diverse systems," stated Ronald J. Zimmer, president and CEO of CABA.