Common ontology needed for big data

CEO of Buildings IOT, Brian Turner, has been announced as the keynote at AIRAH’s Big Data and Analytics Forum 2022 on Thursday, June 23, and will highlight the urgent need for industry to adopt a common standard for organising building data.

There are many standards for naming data in the built environment. Although common naming helps to identify what something is, it does not give the entity or piece of data an identity. This is where ontologies come in – to help humans and machines exchange data with full understanding of what a thing is, with full context of its location, areas served, sources of energy, expected data, and much more.

Turner says there are many different ontologies at the moment, with more on the way. This causes an issue, because there is no alignment across the industry.

“Brick, Project Haystack, Google’s Digital Building Ontology and Microsoft’s Real Estate Core are just a few of the competing options,” says Turner.

“Each of them approaches the problem in a slightly different way, at different granularity, but they inherently create the same problem we have today – no common way to identify the entities, relationships, and data across the built environment.”

Turner was instrumental in creating the Ontology Alignment Project (OAP), an initiative that aims to address the issue and make data both available and useful across enterprises. He hopes his presentation at the Forum will raise awareness of the issue and the possible solutions.

“We need to pressure the industry to adopt one standard or get behind the OAP,” he says. “Modelling buildings should be someone’s intellectual property.”

For more information about the Big Data and Analytics Forum and to register, click here.