GBIG is a critical nexus of green building information and therefore a key research destination. Within GBIG, one can discover specific building project data, learn about USGBC member organizations, and promote green building standards.

GBIG is a powerful networking tool, connecting people, products, and services to green buildings around the world. Users can link architects, construction companies, and product vendors globally, all while sharing industry trends and innovations.

To aggregate and then present building information from across the world, Green River needed to leverage building certifications, publicly available record, and member-managed data before creating the Gateway as truly invaluable by inserting organizational profiles, novel industry content, and social networking components.

Teasing out the precise geographical location of each edifice to populate on map search was a surprisingly difficult challenge. For large developments like skyscrapers and campuses, the owner's location is not often readily apparent and might not correlate with the building's physical location.

We started with cataloging LEED certified and registered projects. But the goal of the Gateway was always to present as big a picture as possible, and so we engineered the site to also include data on hundreds of certification programs, awards, and disclosures.

Presenting an integrated view of the many potential green facets of a building project, and then being able to include them in aggregate statistic analyses, is at the heart of the site. Nowhere else on the web can you find a central resource pool for data on green buildings.

Turns out, gathering, correlating, and synthesizing those myriad project data points was in itself a technical challenge. On the backend, we engineered a system that runs automated update routines, processing hundreds of thousands of updates multiple times a day.

At any one time, a mass of disparate data sources are in play, including direct SQL queries, but also CSV files and XLS files, and even data gleaned from web scraping.

GBIG offers a wealth of information on the world’s built environment. With a few clicks, everyone from concerned citizens to professional architects, builders, and surveyors can slip quickly and simply into the fascinating depths of the green building industry.

The green building sector is only growing –– beautifully and consciously designed buildings are everywhere, and GBIG is the easiest way to find them.