Ontology Across Building, Emergency, and Energy Standards
The problem is adapting to a rapidly changing world that requires efficient communication. Information about the built environment is central to both emergency and energy needs. There will never be a complete coherent model of everything, but a logical framework for a common core can be developed.
Organizational Structure by Mike Bergman
For Ontologies Across
Building, Emergency and
Energy Standards to work,
a number of languages and
organizations need to work
together as a web service
over the internet. Some
of those languages and
organizations are identified
here. The story begins with
the development of STEP
The geometry of objects, the geometry of the earth, and the relative locations of objects on the earth all start to become very precise. EPISTLE, OASIS, and OGC are all formed in the same year in response to these new capabilities.
The internet keeps getting bigger.
It is becoming more important to
know where information belongs
in a database or in the world.
Building Information Modeling
vendors are certified to comply
with the Industry Foundation �Classes. The STEP Standard
Data Access Interface enables
BIM databases to talk to other
databases like never before.
Metadata starts to be standardized. Open communities of practice explode, Creative Commons is born, Ontolog convenes, gbXML goes online.
oBIX, SVG, CAP, RDF/XML rapidly emerge, until finally we reach OWL
Everything seems to be working together fairly well, but Building Information is having interoperability problems. There is a schism
Unlike geospatial data, building data does not have a common point of origin. ��Multi-layer, �multi-participant collaboration faces tremendous issues of alignment and scale
Handling geometry is part of the problem
The IFC's are frozen, vendors continue to develop their systems, the least common denominator is the only meeting ground.
To avoid duplication the IFCs reference STEP 41 and 42 for shape representation.
The IFD is standardized, a concept can
exist only once! There are no duplicates!
Which brings us to today, when the IFD will be 2 years old on April 17. buildingSMART and others are working diligently on quality control and the accurate population of this shared resource.
IFD and EPISTLE share much of the same ideas and have the same core structure, the initiatives are different. IFD only talks about types of things. EPISTLE will also store instances or individuals. To cover the same functionality as EPISTLE , IFD relies on the IFC standard.
Because there is so little time
and so much to do - what shall
be populated first? What can the most people agree on? What are the most logical elements to fill the top level?
An example of collaboration
and prioritizing is shown for OmniClass Table 49, Properties. Wherein the location properties will be hammered out with OGC
in a few phone calls.
Both developers and practitioners can use these classifications and appropriate terminology.
The issue today is modularity. A set of tools and rules is needed for cross-domain information exchange and representation. Activities that have been happening in parallel need to be able to converge in a controlled fashion.
Building standards should integrate with emergency standards BEFORE energy standards because NFPA, OSHA, NEMA and others almost agree on the names of things and the short list of important items to show.
The geometry of energy is too organic to start with first.
Information needs for emergencies
are more consistent.
Lessons learned can be applied to temperature measurements and regional differences with greater efficiency using the tools and rules needed for emergency standards.
Making the business case for a common ontology evolving from prior disparate efforts catalyzed by math and geometry. Who are the people that need to be involved?
Standards already float across the semantic and pragmatic boundaries, the challenge today is to formalize in an ontology.
NIST's "Building Infomation Exchange for First Responders" project has cross-domain stakeholders.
Source: Holmberg, Opening slides for the Building Information Exchange with First Responders Workshop
October 15-16, 2008, "Holmberg BIEFR Workshop Oct08.ppt"
As in Emergency Response, there are energy cross-domain stakeholders . The "Smart Energy Grid" can be considered as both distributing power to buildings AND though-out buildings.
Reasoning over building geometry
is key for many decision-support �tasks in Energy Services.
Source: Bosquet, M.L., "GridWise Standards Mapping �Overview", Pacific Northwest National Laboratory,"
March, 2004.
Source: Boehm, Robert, "UNLV Zero or Near-Zero Energy House Projects in Las Vegas", presented at CERL: Net-Zero Energy for Communities workshop, February 3, 2009.
Golden Gate Safety Network
GPS Aggregation
Buildings do not live in a vacuum. Current representations of the larger built environoment are not standardized, this work moves towards formal representation and exchange
Interactive Floor Plan Demo and Working Papers�http://maplab.org/ofpdocs�
Building Models
are too big to
exchange quickly
Extract only those
elements needed
Lightweight
Standalone
Interoperable
To query
floorplans and
other building
drawings
Its not about style, but which information is most relevant and shown first, then a stragetic order to drill down as more information is needed.
Static Data (1S69)
See the Dictionary at http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?FloorplanMarkupLanguage
An ideal team requires expertise and understanding in: