Skip to main content

PNNL

  • About
  • News & Media
  • Careers
  • Events
  • Research
    • Scientific Discovery
      • Biology
        • Chemical Biology
        • Computational Biology
        • Ecosystem Science
        • Human Health
          • Cancer Biology
          • Exposure Science & Pathogen Biology
        • Integrative Omics
          • Advanced Metabolomics
          • Chemical Biology
          • Mass Spectrometry-Based Measurement Technologies
          • Spatial and Single-Cell Proteomics
          • Structural Biology
        • Microbiome Science
          • Biofuels & Bioproducts
          • Human Microbiome
          • Soil Microbiome
          • Synthetic Biology
        • Predictive Phenomics
      • Chemistry
        • Computational Chemistry
        • Chemical Separations
        • Chemical Physics
        • Catalysis
      • Earth & Coastal Sciences
        • Global Change
        • Atmospheric Science
          • Atmospheric Aerosols
          • Human-Earth System Interactions
          • Modeling Earth Systems
        • Coastal Science
        • Ecosystem Science
        • Subsurface Science
        • Terrestrial Aquatics
      • Materials Sciences
        • Materials in Extreme Environments
        • Precision Materials by Design
        • Science of Interfaces
        • Solid Phase Processing
          • Cold Spray
          • Friction Stir Welding & Processing
          • ShAPE
      • Nuclear & Particle Physics
        • Dark Matter
        • Flavor Physics
        • Fusion Energy Science
        • Neutrino Physics
      • Quantum Information Sciences
    • Energy Resiliency
      • Electric Grid Modernization
        • Emergency Response
        • Grid Analytics
          • AGM Program
          • Tools and Capabilities
        • Grid Architecture
        • Grid Cybersecurity
        • Grid Energy Storage
        • Grid Resilience and Decarbonization
          • Earth System Modeling
          • Energy System Modeling
        • Transmission
        • Distribution
      • Energy Efficiency
        • Appliance and Equipment Standards
        • Building Energy Codes
        • Building Technologies
          • Advanced Building Controls
          • Advanced Lighting
          • Building-Grid Integration
        • Building and Grid Modeling
        • Commercial Buildings
          • Building Energy Asset Score
          • High-Impact Technology Integration
          • Unique Building Identification
        • Federal Buildings
          • Federal Performance Optimization
          • Resilience and Security
        • Grid Resilience and Decarbonization
        • Residential Buildings
          • Building America Solution Center
          • Energy Efficient Technology Integration
          • Home Energy Score
        • Energy Efficient Technology Integration
      • Energy Storage
        • Electrochemical Energy Storage
        • Flexible Loads and Generation
        • Grid Integration, Controls, and Architecture
        • Regulation, Policy, and Valuation
        • Science Supporting Energy Storage
        • Chemical Energy Storage
      • Environmental Management
        • Waste Processing
        • Radiation Measurement
        • Environmental Remediation
      • Fossil Energy
        • Subsurface Energy Systems
        • Carbon Management
          • Carbon Capture
          • Carbon Storage
          • Carbon Utilization
        • Advanced Hydrocarbon Conversion
      • Nuclear Energy
        • Fuel Cycle Research
        • Advanced Reactors
        • Reactor Operations
        • Reactor Licensing
      • Renewable Energy
        • Solar Energy
        • Wind Energy
          • Wind Resource Characterization
          • Wildlife and Wind
          • Community Values and Ocean Co-Use
          • Wind Systems Integration
          • Wind Data Management
          • Distributed Wind
        • Marine Energy
          • Environmental Monitoring for Marine Energy
          • Marine Biofouling and Corrosion
          • Marine Energy Resource Characterization
          • Testing for Marine Energy
          • The Blue Economy
        • Hydropower
          • Environmental Performance of Hydropower
          • Hydropower Cybersecurity and Digitalization
          • Hydropower and the Electric Grid
          • Materials Science for Hydropower
          • Pumped Storage Hydropower
          • Water + Hydropower Planning
        • Grid Integration of Renewable Energy
        • Geothermal Energy
      • Transportation
        • Bioenergy Technologies
          • Algal Biofuels
          • Aviation Biofuels
          • Waste-to-Energy and Products
        • Hydrogen & Fuel Cells
        • Vehicle Technologies
          • Emission Control
          • Energy-Efficient Mobility Systems
          • Lightweight Materials
          • Vehicle Electrification
          • Vehicle Grid Integration
    • National Security
      • Chemical & Biothreat Signatures
        • Contraband Detection
        • Pathogen Science & Detection
        • Explosives Detection
        • Threat-Agnostic Biodefense
      • Cybersecurity
        • Discovery and Insight
        • Proactive Defense
        • Trusted Systems
      • Nuclear Material Science
      • Nuclear Nonproliferation
        • Radiological & Nuclear Detection
        • Nuclear Forensics
        • Ultra-Sensitive Nuclear Measurements
        • Nuclear Explosion Monitoring
        • Global Nuclear & Radiological Security
      • Stakeholder Engagement
        • Disaster Recovery
        • Global Collaborations
        • Legislative and Regulatory Analysis
        • Technical Training
      • Systems Integration & Deployment
        • Additive Manufacturing
        • Deployed Technologies
        • Rapid Prototyping
        • Systems Engineering
      • Threat Analysis
        • Advanced Wireless Security
          • 5G Security
          • RF Signal Detection & Exploitation
        • Grid Resilience and Decarbonization
        • Internet of Things
        • Maritime Security
        • Millimeter Wave
        • Mission Risk and Resilience
    • Data Science & Computing
      • Artificial Intelligence
      • Graph and Data Analytics
      • Software Engineering
      • Computational Mathematics & Statistics
      • Future Computing Technologies
        • Adaptive Autonomous Systems
      • Visual Analytics
    • Publications & Reports
    • Featured Research
  • People
    • Inventors
    • Lab Leadership
    • Lab Fellows
    • Staff Accomplishments
  • Partner with PNNL
    • Education
      • Undergraduate Students
      • Graduate Students
      • Post-graduate Students
      • University Faculty
      • University Partnerships
      • K-12 Educators and Students
      • STEM Education
        • STEM Workforce Development
        • STEM Outreach
        • Meet the Team
      • Internships
    • Community
      • Regional Impact
      • Philanthropy
      • Volunteering
    • Industry
      • Available Technologies
      • Industry
      • Industry Partnerships
      • Licensing & Technology Transfer
      • Entrepreneurial Leave
      • Visual Intellectual Property Search (VIPS)
  • Facilities & Centers
    • All Facilities
      • Atmospheric Radiation Measurement User Facility
      • Electricity Infrastructure Operations Center
      • Energy Sciences Center
      • Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory
      • Grid Storage Launchpad
      • Institute for Integrated Catalysis
      • Interdiction Technology and Integration Laboratory
      • PNNL Portland Research Center
      • PNNL Seattle Research Center
      • PNNL-Sequim (Marine and Coastal Research)
      • Radiochemical Processing Laboratory
      • Shallow Underground Laboratory

Breadcrumb

  1. Research
  2. Energy Resiliency
  3. Energy Efficiency
  4. Commercial Buildings
  5. Unique Building Identification

Unique Building Identification

A key to locational precision

Unique Building Identification reduces locational ambiguity and makes it easier to accurately associate various types of data, such as energy use, to a specific building.

  • Appliance and Equipment Standards
  • Building Energy Codes
  • Building Technologies
  • Building and Grid Modeling
  • Commercial Buildings
    • Building Energy Asset Score
    • High-Impact Technology Integration
    • Unique Building Identification
  • Federal Buildings
  • Grid Resilience and Decarbonization
  • Residential Buildings
  • Energy Efficient Technology Integration
  • News & Updates

Unique Building Identification (UBID) technology, developed by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) pinpoints the exact physical location and extent of space that a building occupies. This knowledge makes it possible to gather and study accurate, reliable information about a building and its spatial characteristics.

Traditional street addresses work for mail delivery but not necessarily for identifying precise building locations and footprints. A corner building, for example, could have two addresses—one for each street. Or a large building perhaps spans multiple addresses, but only one is shown in public records. This locational ambiguity, particularly in today’s data-rich environment, makes it difficult to accurately associate various types of data, such as energy use, to a specific building.

PNNL continues to develop UBID, which is an open-source software project. The technology has shown that it can resolve anomalies associated with traditional location methods and help harness data to benefit buildings and their operation. Originally designed to assess energy benchmarking characteristics in buildings, the technology’s general-purpose nature has garnered interest from other fields.

  • Project Overview
  • GitHub Repository
  • UBID Apps and Example Websites
stylizedmap
UBID uses an open-source grid reference system to create a code string that represents a building’s precise location and extent of space.

How UBID works

For a building, land parcel, or any other two-dimensional footprint, UBID assigns a code string of letters and numbers based on an open-source grid reference system, specifically the Open Location Code (OLC) created by Google Zürich. UBID employs OLC to locate the center of mass of a shape—a building—and then uses the center to compute the north, east, south, and west extents. The code strings reflect these boundaries and can be read and written by UBID users. The strings naturally scale down to parts of buildings and assets within buildings, but also scale up to groups of buildings, such as campuses, and even the entire surface of the Earth.

UBID-derived building information is designed for easy overlay on publicly available, web-based mapping platforms and enables fast and accurate spatial matching with minimal computational resources. The UBID technology runs on any computer operating system and is available in multiple programming languages.

PNNL and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Building Technologies Office support the ongoing development of the technology, future pilot testing in real-world settings, and commercialization. These efforts include collaboration with state and local governments, commercial and residential building data aggregators, property owners, and product and service providers.

Benefited parties

City agencies, commercial real estate, and others track large sets of building data. City agencies across the United States developed local building identification numbering systems primarily for tax properties and building permits, but these local systems are inadequate for the rising needs of connecting building attributes to data points across a variety of sources.

A unique identification system for buildings provides a standardized framework under which a unifying field is used to match building data from various sources to a single object. It will facilitate data management and sharing by reducing the risk of mismatching or duplicating building data, and it will ease the burden of data exchange.

City departments will be able to jointly track building information for multiple governmentally related functions. Washington, DC recently added UBIDs to its Open Data DC data set.

Commercial real estate will better leverage various data sources to evaluate and manage their building assets.

Emergency response, such as that from police and fire departments, will react in less time during emergencies.

National security agencies will immediately identify critical buildings, such as schools and hospitals.

Building Energy Data Analysis (BEDA) Accelerator

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) initiated the BEDA Accelerator, which ran from 2018 to 2020, to facilitate adoption of UBID. For more information, please visit the Building Energy Data Analysis site.

Participate & contact us

We welcome anyone passionate about buildings or data to attend our web conferences, participate in our workshops, and join our discussions. Simply send us an email at BuildingID@pnnl.gov and let us know how you'd like to be involved.

Scroll down to the bottom of the page for a list of downloadable resources.

Recent News

JANUARY 24, 2022
Feature

X Marks the Spot; So Does UBID

Read
map
NOVEMBER 26, 2019
Feature

Conquering Peak Power

Read
City buildings with connections
APRIL 11, 2019
Feature

Making America’s Buildings More Energy Efficient

Read
Commercial buildings

Related Divisions

Electricity Infrastructure and Buildings Division

Contact

Tim Ledbetter
Communications Professional
Tim.Ledbetter@pnnl.gov
509.375.5953

Resources

UBID Apps and Examples WebsiteUnique Building Identification Kickoff WebinarUnique Building Identification Kickoff Webinar VideoUnique Building Identifiers Year in ReviewUnique Building Identifiers Year in Review VideoBuilding Energy Data Analysis (BEDA) Accelerator (12/21/2018)Building Energy Data Analysis (BEDA) Accelerator (01/08/2019)UBID for CECBEDA Accelerator Washington DC (02/05/2019)BEDA Accelerator (02/12/2019)BEDA Accelerator (03/12/2019)Integration of UBID with Portfolio Manager (04/10/2019)San Jose Microsoft Cross Reference Analysis (05/14/2019)San Jose Microsoft Footprint to Parcel Analysis(PDF) 06-11-2019Miami-Dade Microsoft Cross Reference Analysis(PDF) 07-09-2019Content for UBID Standard (08/09/2019)BEDA Accelerator Year 1 outcome report and Year 2 planning (09-16-2019)BEDA Accelerator (10/08/2019)Energy Benchmarking with UBIDs (Draft 11/12/2019)BEDA Accelerator Monthly Working Call (01/10/2020)BEDA Accelerator (02/11/2020)UBID Partner Interview Summary (04/12/2020)BEDA Accelerator Monthly Working Call (07/14/2020)BEDA Accelerator Activity Summary (09/08/2020)UBID Washington D.C. Case StudyUBID Public Sector Implementation GuideBuilding Technologies Office 2019 Peer ReviewUBID journal article - Wang, N., Vlachokostas, A., Borkum, M., Bergmann, H., & …Unique Building IdentifiersBuilding Performance Standard (BPS) Covered Buildings List Guide

PNNL

  • Get in Touch
    • Contact
    • Careers
    • Doing Business
    • Environmental Reports
    • Security & Privacy
    • Vulnerability Disclosure Policy
  • Research
    • Scientific Discovery
    • Energy Resiliency
    • National Security
Subscribe to PNNL News
Department of Energy Logo Battelle Logo
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) is managed and operated by Battelle for the Department of Energy
  • YouTube
  • Facebook
  • X (formerly Twitter)
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn