"Big Data" in Green Building ,design, construction, and operation of the built environment.

The building industry often enters the “Big Data” conversation through energy efficiency, and Smart Grid and the proliferation of sensors and sub-meters. These provide unprecedented information about energy use over time and across spatial scales. This also reflects the long-standing, foundational importance of energy efficiency to the green buildingmovement. “Big Data” refers to mixtures of volume (scale of data), velocity (analysis of streaming data), variety (difference in forms of data), and veracity (uncertainty associated data). Relatively speaking, energy efficiency alone is modest by these measures. Green building changes things and brings true Big Data into play. Green building encompasses energy efficiency and adds many more dimensions of performance. LEED offers a definition of green building which includes location and transportation, energy and atmosphere, water efficiency, materials and resources, and indoor environmentalquality. This breaks out into hundreds of individual LEED credits and thousands of specific metrics. A Big Data story starts to emerge when tens of thousands of green buildings projects using thousands of metrics, generate data from tens or hundreds of thousands of automated “points”, and provide daily experiences for millions of occupants. Now, we’re talking Big Data: huge data volumes, streaming at different rates, taking a wide variety of forms, and varying dramatically in their accuracy, precision, and reliability.