Information Stewardship

A design firm came on to campus the other day to begin conversations on the new School of Information and Library Science (SILS). Library Science has been one of the more interesting areas of IT in the last few years, as they are positioning themselves as the side of Information Technology (IT) not concerned with the bits and bytes, nor with the collection of data, but with delivery of information.

The Art of the Librarian has always been about the delivery of the right information in the right format at the right time. Google delivers vast amounts of references at your fingertips, each information set and document only a click away. Little Billy in the second grade asks the school Librarian for a book about frogs and his handed a book with lots of pictures and small words. Nine years later, William, now taking AP Biology, asks the school Librarian for a book about frogs and gets an entirely different set of volumes. Librarians know that context determines the correct information.

The design firm knows a little something about its audience, and they presented a pitch that the project use new approaches based information stewardship. New approaches can be a difficult sell to someone who has one chance once to build a building. Even so, it seems to me the Information Stewardship is a good line to take with Librarians.

Information Stewardship appears include keeping all design information on-line and electronically readable. All commissioning information will also be kept on line. Making a statement that speaks to me, the firm also asked that they have access to live operating data for at least a year, to make sure that the building delivers the energy and performance goals that are specified in the design.

This last point is particularly important. One of the worst failings of first generation LEEDS Green Buildings was their long term performance. Platinum building performance was never verified. Innovative designed were never adequately explained to maintenance and operations personnel. At last, that nettlesome vibration is solved putting a brick on the damper. At last, that noise in the duct is blocked by shoving a file cabinet in front of the oversized return. A year after delivery, the performance is poor.

Regular readers will recognize the goals of this project as being similar to those of the National Building Information Model Standard (NBIMS), now known as buildSmart. It is interesting that the design firm professed no awareness of NBIMS, and in particular, no awareness of the Common Operations Building Information Exchange (COBIE) which specifies the hand-off of information from design and construction to operations.

SILS has recently begun offering concentrations in Bioinformatics. There is some discussion about adding a concentration in Business Informatics. Perhaps, with the aid of Building Information Stewardship, we can begin the development of Building Informatics. If so, this could be the missing piece in developing the abstractions needed to develop truly responsive buildings for the transacted energy grid.

Is anyone else as confused as I about the differences between Informatics, Infomatics, and Analytics? They seem to be used interchangeably, but in different conversations. Please post if you can define the distinctions.

The End of the Bottom Line

Saturday’s Wall Street Journal (May 12, 2007) had a front page story on the end of the bottom line. The old style bottom line, designed to give banks a picture of whether they would be paid if the company failed, and where the cash was coming from, is deemed to have outlived its usefulness. Years of taking special charges and hedging income off-line put it in the emergency room. Financial plays, foreign hedges, and other high end tricks that can swamp the numbers from business operations have killed it. New statements will replace the bottom lines with separate P&Ls for the company's operating business, its financing activities, investing activities and tax payments. The overall message is that it was easier to game the old statements than to just do well in business.

Isn’t it time we retire other unidimensional measures that are easier to game than they are to do well? Readers of this blog may guess that I am referring to carbon credits, green power, and green buildings.

Stanford Professor Mark Jacobson was the first to declare loudly, publicly, and with actual energy calculations that Corn Ethanol was a net energy loss. However renewable the corn was, oil was used to fertilize it, to drive tractors around it, and often the final distillation used coal. Others will find over the next year that using government subsidies to misuse a key food crop used in meat production across the US, causing the price of not only corn, but soon meat fed on corn, to rise, brings its own problems.

California has recognized this, and is creating new standards will only award carbon credits based upon full life cycle analysis of alternative automotive fuels. This will undoubtedly cause its own controversies, but it is a step in the right direction. We need to look beyond first glance at all alternative fuels.

Green power is one of those things consumers want, but with an asterisk. People want renewable power but want to know how. To some, bird deaths make wind power unacceptable. (I have a friend who installs renewable power systems who has learned to describe turbines in “fractional cat-years’ – but that is another story…). In other areas, energy systems that use scarce water resources make some renewable power technologies a poor choice. People want to be able to choose between fish runs and reliability. For automated green power markets to work, we need to commit to full verifiable ontologies, meaning computer readable meanings of green power that will express the different values that consumers want.

Green buildings are finally hot. Multiple reports in the last few weeks have suggested that at last we are seeing increased rent for green buildings. But what does this mean?

In the middle of the largest building boom in a generation at UNC, I note that we always seem to build on parking lots. We always seem to put parking lots in places where buildings are eventually going to go. Under LEEDS, you will always get extra points for building upon a brown field, whose definition includes a parking lot. So the campus always gets extra green points for each building.

OSCRE (Open Systems for Commercial Real Estate) develops standard data structures to describe all the dimensions of value in piece of property. Clearly, GREEN-ness has become a source of value. Will we be able to describe this value in some way other than a single LEEDS number?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117893520139500814.html

Beyond Carbon Trading – Toward an Ontology of Power

Lately I’ve been thinking about an ontology for Power Generation. If buying green, and consumer autonomy are ever going to be valued on the markets, we must get beyond a two-dimensional system of Price/Carbon

Yesterday’s New York Times, in the article “Carbon-Neutral Is Hip, but Is It Green?” (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/29/weekinreview/29revkin.html) states quite well the concern that today’s Carbon Credits are much more about self image than they are about actually doing anything, well, useful. I love the category “Global Coolness”.

But there is real value here. The question is, how do we realize it?

I think we need an ontology of power generation. There. I’ve written it. As I look at the sentence, it is one of the least plausible sentences I have ever written. But it is important.

As I wrote in a previous post, customers of intelligent buildings, and of the intelligent grid are never going to have a sustained interest in pure efficiency or economy. Look around and see the number of expensive and inefficient decisions that are made every day. We need to get to an place wherein good decisions, aligned with citizen values, can be made by agents.

If the GridWise model develops, and Agents in or for Intelligent Buildings are making on-the-fly power decisions, based upon pricing and availability, and reflecting their owner’s values, we must devise a way to make these agents informed. An Ontology of power needs at least three major dimensions:

• Economics. Price and Availability are essential in any market taxonomy.
• Reliability/Quality of Service. This has many components. I recently listened to a generator describe Just-In-Time (JIT) coal delivery, and how more intimate interactions with the railroad reduced costs. This might be a good thing, but it might also put this generator at risk as a reliable supplier, depending on Labor Relations, Weather, or even some sort of mine catastrophe. An ontology of power needs to delineate the risks.
• Greenliness. This is more than Carbon. What other environmental costs are involved? Do I want to trade three wild-life destructions for one carbon credit? What about water use in an arid area? Are those renewable resources harvested sustainably from farms or from virgin forests? I know an installer of wind turbines who has learned to describe bird kills in terms of fractional cat-years.

I like to imagine the consumer describing his values to the agent in his house, or the third party aggregator acting in his behalf. Either way, that agent buys power on the spot market to meet the consumer’s needs and aspirations.

This would require that each power generator in the market have its attributes published. Selections would vary with time of day and availability. New sources would come onto the market. The agent would only understand how to make the decisions needed because those attributes must fit within the ontology of power.

References:

IUCN and Accounting for Natural Resources http://www.iucn.org/

OASIS Forest Industries TC http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=forest

Euopean Seafood Safety Tracking System