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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