The Building Performance Institute, Inc. (BPI), Malta, NY, announced in October that it plans to standardize an open data collection and reporting tool. The tool will facilitate online information exchange by sectors of the home performance industry.

Home Performance Extensible Markup Language (HPXML) was developed by BPI with funding provided by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). HPXML is based on exchange capability in use by thousands of contractors in New York state programs and is currently used in the EPA-sponsored Northern Virginia Home Performance with ENERGY STAR program. The HPXML schema is available in its current form for use by any person or organization through a public, BPI-sponsored web site, homeperformancexml.org.

According to BPI, adopting HPXML as a BPI standard would enable BPI to communicate more easily with contractors and improve the efficiency of quality assurance.