For lighting designers
ULC records read straight into your fixture comparisons, luminaire schedules, and VE reviews, every attribute traceable to the manufacturer's source. The tools you already use, and any LLM, can read ULC today.
Designer trackUniversal Luminaire Cutsheet · Open standard
Luminaire datasheets were built for people to read, not for the AI now doing the reading.
ULC is the open, machine-readable standard for luminaire cutsheets: one structured record design tools and AI read directly, published alongside the PDF, IES, and LDT files manufacturers already make.
Why ULC
Luminaire data has lived for decades in PDF datasheets, IES photometric files, and EULUMDAT (LDT) files: each formatted its own way, each written to be read by a person. That worked when a designer opened one datasheet at a time. It breaks the moment a design tool or an AI agent has to read a hundred of them to answer a single question.
Pulling structure back out of a PDF is slow, expensive, and error-prone, whether a designer does it by hand across twelve datasheets or an AI does it across the five hundred pages of a submittal. The bottleneck isn't the AI; it's the data. ULC closes that gap: one structured JSON record per attested photometric scenario. Every ULC record fingerprints each of its source files with a SHA-256 hash, a tamper-evident seal, and ties every value back to the file it came from, so anyone can confirm the data is the manufacturer's real data, unchanged. The datasheet, IES, and LDT stay exactly where they are. ULC just makes their contents readable by machine.
How to use ULC?
ULC is read, not opened. Design tools, spec databases, data pipelines, and general-purpose LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude parse a ULC record directly, with no PDF-extraction step. Lighting-domain specialty tools go further, fetching the linked IES and LDT files on demand and resolving industry shorthand. Both work; the difference is depth, not whether ULC is consumable.
For lighting manufacturers
Show up when a designer asks an AI which fixture fits. Publish a ULC record alongside the PDF, IES, and LDT files you already produce, and your products surface in AI-mediated discovery with the attributes you published, not whatever an extraction layer guessed. You own the data at its source.
Manufacturer trackAdoption
This list fills in as manufacturers publish .ulc files for
their products. In the meantime, ULC is in active dialogue with
leading organizations like the IES and the LIA, with manufacturer
and software-vendor pilots underway.
If you specify lighting, ask your manufacturers to publish ULC. Let's grow this list together.