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[ontology-summit] Hackathon: BACnet Ontology

To: Ontology Summit 2013 <ontology-summit@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: Joel Bender <jjb5@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 8 Mar 2013 20:09:31 +0000
Message-id: <7003D7C1-6B7C-46D5-B648-FB63D1C83137@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Ontologians,    (01)


I am interested in collaborators for developing an ontology for building 
automation and control networks to be incorporated into a future revision of 
the BACnet standard [1].  This is an opportunity to build a specification that 
will be an American Standard, European Standard, and ISO standard.    (02)

As the scope of this work gradually shifts from intrinsic to extrinsic 
challenges, the help I need will also shift from the simple "you can't do that 
in OWL" to the sublime "notice how these other people model this problem, 
follow their lead."    (03)

I started down this road many years ago thinking that I could take on something 
simple like "units" and apply that experience to this (in my mind larger and 
more difficult) problem.  That effort didn't pan out like I expected, but I 
have since been reinvigorated by the work that Steve Ray has done for the FSGIM 
and by the recent presentations of GEOSS and OGC, and older presentations by 
Michelle Raymond of the BIM.    (04)

If you would like more details, please don't hesitate to ask.    (05)

Oh, and I mention that the output of this effort is OWL, not that I don't think 
there are better languages and appreciate how well they can describe a model, 
but OWL would most likely be the most comprehensible by the ASHRAE committee.    (06)


Joel
[1] <http://www.bacnet.org/>
--------------------    (07)

BACnet Ontology for Hackathon    (08)

        Joel Bender
        Cornell University    (09)

1. Objective and Goals    (010)

The objective of this Hackathon is to take a transliteration of the BACnet™ 
ASN.1 productions in RDF/RDFS and produce an OWL ontology that is interoperable 
with other specifications in the building automation industry.    (011)

BACnet™ is a communications protocol for Building Automation and Control 
Systems (BACS) developed under the auspices of the American Society of Heating, 
Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE).  BACnet is an American 
national standard, a European standard, a national standard in more than 30 
countries, and an ISO global standard.  The protocol is supported and 
maintained by ASHRAE Standing Standard Project Committee 135 (SSPC-135).    (012)

2. Challenges    (013)

There are two sets of challenges; intrinsic - those related to developing an 
ontology that properly models what is described in the standard, and extrinsic 
- where the standard uses terminology that is also used in other standards, but 
maybe inconsistent with those other standards.    (014)

2.1 Intrinsic Challenge    (015)

BACnet specifies not just the "on the wire" encoding and decoding of 
communications requests and responses, but also a rich model of "objects" and 
"properties".  Properties have restrictions on their data types and values 
which may be atomic values (booleans, integers, strings, etc) or structured 
data (lists of composite objects).  Many properties are optional, and in some 
cases optional properties are grouped together so if some specific property 
exists then another property must also exist in a BACnet conferment device.    (016)

Clause 21 of the standard specifies the request and response protocol data 
units in ASN.1 productions, and Annex C specifies the object types and 
properties as ASN.1, but both are woefully inadequate for formal model 
analysis.  However, they do provide a lexicon and naming convention which could 
be used to build a ontology.    (017)

2.2 Extrinsic Challenge    (018)

The building automation industry is similar in nature to the industrial process 
control industry and shares may of the same basic concepts and terminology.  
Formally matching these concepts will facilitate software developers developing 
systems that can provide a holistic view of energy use throughout a campus that 
may include office, research, and manufacturing buildings.    (019)

Similarly, the OGC Observation and Measurement Model and the W3C Semantic 
Sensor Network Ontology share many of the same concepts and relationships with 
building automation sensor networks.    (020)

There are a variety of other standards listed under Section 5 which are in turn 
being incorporated into new standards under development, for example, ISO 15926 
and IEC 61850 are being incorporated into a new Facility Smart Grid Information 
Model (FSGIM) begin built as part of the national smart grid initiative.    (021)

3. Deliverables    (022)

The resulting OWL file and supporting documentation will be submitted to 
SSPC-135 for future inclusion into the standard.    (023)

4. Process Expectations    (024)

This Hackathon will begin with the RDF/RDFS transliteration produced by script. 
 It will be available in N3 or NT format that can be successfully imported into 
NeOn and Protégé with the expectation that the same format will be acceptable 
to other tools.  The hacking will be an iterative cycle of automated analysis, 
adjusting the ontology under construction to resolve errors, adding additional 
requirements as specified in the standard, and repeating.    (025)

5. References    (026)

The following is a list of other standards, many of which are formally 
described by modeling tools that are quite different from OWL such as UML and 
XML-Schema, which are expected to provide some architectural mapping 
inspiration or there is an industry expectation that software and systems built 
using one of these standards can interoperate with BACnet software and systems.    (027)

ISO 13584 - Industrial automation systems and integration - Parts library    (028)

ISO 15926 - Industrial Automation Systems and Integration    (029)

IEC 61499 - Distributed Control and Automation    (030)

IEC 61850 - Electrical Substation Automation    (031)

IEC 61968 - Application integration at electric utilities    (032)

LBNL OpenADR - Open Automated Demand Response Communication Standards    (033)

OASIS EMIX - OASIS Energy Market Information Exchange    (034)

WS-Calendar - OASIS Web Services Calendar    (035)

GEOSS - Global Earth Observation System of Systems    (036)

gbXML - Green Building XML    (037)

BIM - Building Information Model    (038)

WXXM - Weather Data Exchange Model    (039)

W3C SSN - Semantic Sensor Network Ontology    (040)

OGC Observation and Measurement Model - Open Geospatial Consortium    (041)



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