Buildings IOT, one of the companies that has been attacking the problem of IoT ecosystem fragmentation, is taking another step toward enabling community-driven solutions for buildings adopting IoT and automation technologies.
The company is making its Ontology Alignment Project (OAP), which it announced a little over a year ago, available as open source. OAP helps building owners and operators understand the data being collected by multiple systems at the properties, much of it filtered through a variety of different ontologies and schema like the Google Buildings Ontology Project, BrickSchema, and Project Haystack.
The decision to open-source OAP comes in response to partners and customers wanting to contribute to the project and adapt it with their own interests in mind. In response to questions from Fierce Electronics, the company said via email, “We've had a lot of interest from folks in the smart buildings community who were interested in viewing the source code of the OAP. The interest seems to be two-fold: 1) Folks are interested in leveraging the OAP for their own purposes, and 2) In order to do that, they would like to be able to contribute to it. We view the OAP as a community effort and see it as a way to enhance interoperability.”
Buildings IOT has some experience with open source software, having worked with the Universal Device Management Interface, an open source platform for managing IoT systems, but this is the first time a company has released an entire library of its own to the open source community.
OAP previously was available only from a dedicated OAP website as a readable document. Now, users can make pull requests, as they can for any publicly available code repository.
“By open-sourcing OAP, we’ve opened up the ability for conversations that help us better align with the needs of the built environment,” added Brian Turner, CEO of Buildings IOT, in a statement. “Open building automation systems result in easier commissioning, faster troubleshooting, and more reliable, consistent data and reporting, whether for one building or across a portfolio.”
Established to improve building management and operations, the ontology includes a data model for a growing, evolving list of systems within the built environment. The OAP consists of a data model that defines both the type and the points associated with systems within the built environment. In addition to providing standard tags for equipment and devices, the OAP also aims to simplify and specify the relationships that define how entities within the building's systems relate to each other.
Additionally, open-sourcing the OAP enables improved alignment to help facilitate the exchange of data and data models, providing a higher level of interoperability among systems, sensors, and equipment for more effective management and operations within the built environment, the company said.
“By open-sourcing the OAP, we are creating a higher level of interoperability and exchange between other data standards,” said Rob Vandenberg, CTO of Buildings IOT. “All of the existing data standards understand the interoperability problem within the built environment, and they each attempt to solve it based on their own interpretations of what is needed. The OAP, however, supplements those efforts and improves upon them in a way that is mutually beneficial to everyone.”
The OAP makes it easier for integrators to get a site digital-building ready or improve an existing system without requiring duplicative efforts across the technology stack.
“Building owners can be confident that the underlying data in their various building systems is normalized, standardized, and vendor-agnostic,” added Turner. “As buildings and their systems grow in complexity, our goal with open sourcing the OAP is to provide simplicity so that building operations and service managers can capture meaningful insights into commissioning and maintenance activities to meet regulatory initiatives and improve the tenant experience.”