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Re: [ontology-summit] Hackathon: BACnet Ontology

To: Ontology Summit 2013 discussion <ontology-summit@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: "MacPherson, Deborah" <dmacpherson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 8 Mar 2013 17:53:02 -0500
Message-id: <43F2A07F08761449ABD2C0664C74D9FC5380C0D400@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Hi Joel,     (01)

I've forwarded onto someone at Project Haystack that was working on pumps. A 
few months ago I sent him some information from Matthew West RE: the 15926 
Reference Library - they were interested in that too but had questions about IP 
licensing of ISO 15926 and if it is compatible with the open source license 
they are using for Haystack.     (02)

Maybe these dots can connect, even acknowledging having to get over the hump " 
To folks in this audience there are glaring and enormous problems with this 
approach" (tags).      (03)

I share your excitement about Building Automation Federated Lexicon (BAFL).  
Some convergence forces are practically undeniable - the other day Mike Bergman 
sent a link to a GBPN Knowledge Platform launched on 21 February 2013 to help 
the building sector effectively reduce its impact on climate change. See 
http://blog.semantic-web.at/2013/02/28/3192/ for more on potentials on linking 
this open data to not only understand the climate studies but also the HVAC 
systems.    (04)

Once again the piece missing in the middle is an ontology, or even solid 
semantic consistency, of the building envelope between the outside climate and 
interior building automation systems. There is too much information in 
construction documents, energy models are better suited to this purpose, but 
also not small and there is no consistency amongst or between proprietary 
energy modeling systems and software - or there is not yet:). If these 
transactions and pings to the building system can be web-based, there will be 
no choice.     (05)

Regards    (06)

Deb     (07)

DEBORAH MACPHERSON
Specifications and Research    (08)

Cannon Design
3030 Clarendon Blvd. 
Suite 500
Arlington, VA 22201 
 
Phone: 703.907.2353
Direct Dial: 2353    (09)

dmacpherson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
Cannondesign.com  
Skype debmacp    (010)


-----Original Message-----
From: ontology-summit-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
[mailto:ontology-summit-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Joel Bender
Sent: Friday, March 08, 2013 4:12 PM
To: Ontology Summit 2013 discussion
Subject: Re: [ontology-summit] Hackathon: BACnet Ontology    (011)

Deborah,    (012)


> Very interested in this - have you seen the ProjectHaystack tags?     (013)

Yes, I'm been watching that project for while.  As described by Brian Frank 
back in May 2011:    (014)

> 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.    (015)

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.    (016)

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"?    (017)

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.    (018)

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!"    (019)

Note that this hackathon is not that one, in my mind this one has to come 
first.  Thank you for your interest!    (020)


Joel    (021)



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