Water is the next metric the Open Standards Consortium for Real Estate (OSCRE) is tackling in its ambitious project to forge consistency in the collection, management, reporting and transferability of environmental data. The global effort brings together the commercial real estate industry, IT systems developers/service providers and standards and compliance bodies, and has thus far developed and released standards for energy data.

That covers required baseline data for energy data management and approaches for: collecting data from various sources and keepers within an organization; collecting data from the organization’s supply chain; and managing data that is needed for multiple purposes. The energy data standard provides insight on different use cases and implementation tools to support compliance reporting, benchmarking and application programming interface (API) specifications.

Real estate organizations are now invited to participate in the in-progress scoping phase for water data standards. To begin, standards developers are gathering insight on how companies use water data to investigate or assess their operational performance, how that data is managed and reported, and any specific needs or issues they would like to see addressed. Work on developing the standards is expected to begin later this spring.