Mark Vender
AIRAH’s Big Data STG has released a new podcast focusing on the role of data ontologies and the need for a common naming system for building data.
The release follows on from the Big Data and Analytics Forum held last week in Sydney and online. There, keynote speaker Brian Turner from Buildings IOT highlighted the “identity crisis” in the built environment, with various ontologies vying for dominance. These include Brick, Project Haystack, Google’s Digital Building Ontology, Microsoft’s Real Estate Core, and the recently released Quantum Alliance, among others. Although each building may have a solution that works for it individually, in order to scale solutions, there needs to be a common system for data.
Turner noted that different ontologies are born out of different client needs. He said that although initiatives such as Project Haystack are open source and can be influenced by stakeholders, these ontologies move more slowly than projects, meaning that teams working on a particular building or portfolio tend to find their own solutions.
In this context, the chances of the different players all settling on one protocol – as we have seen in other areas of IT, or even in the built environment with BACNET – is unlikely. Rather, Turner said, energies must be directed towards finding a way for buildings that have different ontologies to talk to each other.
“If the integration layer can be at an ontology level,” said Turner, “then we might still have a fighting change of really building something that’s scalable.”
The participants in the latest AIRAH on Air podcast delve into this topic further, sharing their experiences and perspectives on where the industry is heading in terms of data ontologies, and what work needs to be done.
Tristan Webber, Affil.AIRAH; Nicholas Lianos, Affil.AIRAH; Sylvia Quaglia; and Daniel Porragas, Affil.AIRAH, from AIRAH’s Big Data STG all participated in the podcast.
The podcast is available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Leave a Reply