Intelligent Buildings

Finding a Needle in the Internet of Things (part 1)

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Things cost what they cost to install. Ongoing charges are, in the short term, fixed. Value may be the only thing you can control. In the Internet of Things, value will be determined by how many ways you can use that Thing. Value will be determined by how many different uses can use that thing. Some of those users will be other things.

Things (as in the Internet Of…) tend to be commodities. One thing is inherently like another. Once I have more than...

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Work Plan for oBIX 2.0

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Some of you know that the oBIX Committee (open Building Information Exchange) is meeting again. The work is moving ahead on multiple fronts. We have separated encodings (XML and COAP) from the core specification. We are working on separate transport specifications for SOAP and REST (including JSON). We are doing a refresh of the core specification for consistency and conformance. I am most excited, however about the oBIX 2.0, the enterprise services.

The core specification (1.x) requires each oBIX server to provide a lobby. Clients can ask the server what is in the lobby, and thereby discover how to interact with the system behind that server. Contracts are special purpose agreements...

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Must retail energy users be mere price takers?

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A significant wedge between those seeking to maintain the current regulated prices accompanied by DR and those looking to move to transactive energy for a self-regulating grid is the notion that retail customers are all mere price takers. A price taker watches the market and either buys or does not buy; he takes the prices the market offers. Some see that this “lack of power” can only be addressed by regulating the prices offered. This leads back to today’s model...
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Slim BIM: The Middle Ground between Document and Service Part 1

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Engineering information is document oriented. Large documents, even sheaths of documents, are exchanged, specifying in great detail exactly what to do, and how to do it. Modern IT (Information Technology) is based on Services. Service exchanges are minimal, as small as can specify results, and do not specify the means of execution at all. For the last 50 years, IT has moved far faster than have engineered system, the things we can touch, inhabit, or ride around in. For the next 50 years, when engineered systems will need to evolve as fast as IT has for the last 50, we will need a middle ground, between document and service call. This is the challenge of configuration, shared configuration that will enable big systems to interact as nimbly as does IT does today....
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