Re: [ontology-summit] Hackathon: BACnet Ontology

[Michelle Raymond <michellearaymond@xxxxxxxxx>]

Joel,

You have articulated well my view that Project Haystack doesn't go far enough when modeling the role of a point.  We need more than tags we need to codify the rules for which tags are appropriate for which pieces of equipment and parts of the system. We also need which tags can, cannot, or must be applied when another tag or set of tags has been applied.   For example: if I know a point is associated with the return air part of an air handling unit and someone tries to add a tag of 'water' for the material being measured, this should be caught by an ontology reasoner. 

Project Haystack is raising awareness of what could be done with better modeling and as that awareness is raised I hope to see further demand for taking it to the next level as a formal ontology.

I see a real value in what you are proposing both for this year's Hackathon and, what I think is even more exciting, your idea for future work.

Best regards,

Michelle

Michelle A. Raymond

On Fri, Mar 8, 2013 at 3:11 PM, Joel Bender <jjb5@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Deborah,

> Very interested in this - have you seen the ProjectHaystack tags?

Yes, I'm been watching that project for while.  As described by Brian Frank back in May 2011:

> Haystack is focused on defining a basic taxonomy or ontology for building automation energy and environmental systems. The goal is to lay the groundwork for how data can be modeled to enable data mining and analytics. We achieve modeling through the use of applying one or more tags to the "entities". Tags are the unifying mechanism for many different purposes:
>
>       • model semantics such as this sensor is for sensing discharge temperature
>       • relationships between entities (this VAV is supplied by this AHU)
>       • modeling metadata such as units of measurement
> So tags are the model/ontology. Haystack does not specify any database or protocol for what those entities are.

To folks in this audience there are glaring and enormous problems with this approach.  That they make little or no distinction between a taxonomy and ontology, or that there is more to modeling than applying tags, is a indication of the kinds of awful soup of unorganized bits of cruft they (we!) deal with on a regular basis.

To their credit they have built a fairly large community of regular participants and have cooperated on a set of tags.  At some point they might make the transition from folksonomy to ontology, but they have a long way to go.  At Cornell we have naming conventions for our things that go pretty far, but it is inconsistently enforced because of the velocity of changes on our campus and that names have to be applied by humans, and they are subject to individual subjective bias.  What is the naming convention for an "air conditioning unit discharge temperature high limit alarm"?

To solve that problem we a Gellish-like comprehensive list of all the terms that are in our industry along with the Cornell naming convention for each row.  Of course it would be nice for MIT and Stanford and Yale to add to the list with their own naming conventions, where we can boil it down to an ontology (so every instance of a "discharge temperature high limit alarm" is necessarily associated with an instance of a "discharge temperature high limit" which is in turn associated with a "discharge temperature").  To have an ontology like that would be TOTALLY AWESOME because we could build the ontology reference directly into the control system modeling tools and the humans would not be involved in naming anything other than this thing is called AC-1 and not AC-2.

This is exactly what I have in mind for a future hackathon - and I probably can't wait until next year - the Building Automation Federated Lexicon (BAFL).  I have in mind something like the AceWiki with a GitHub backend.  Everyone in this industry should be able to pull the system down, use it with wild abandon, add their own definitions and terms, share their results back up to the cloud, etc.  Where there are referenced standard definitions for terms (like this stuff http://wiki.ashrae.org/index.php/ASHRAEwiki) there should be a way to add citations, but put your own twist on it - "we don't call that 'discharge' around these parts, that's only the stuff that comes outta pipes!"

Note that this hackathon is not that one, in my mind this one has to come first.  Thank you for your interest!


Joel

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