Standards

Highlights from the FIATECH Member Meeting

These have been a couple busy, challenging days at FIATECH, extremely dense in information and conversation. FIATECH is the consortium for the application of IT to Capital Projects. FIATECH was instrumental in the rapid progress of the National Building Information Model Standard (NBIMS). FIATECH is also a national clearing house for information about applying developing technology to construction, including the use of mobile computing and RFID. I am not going to write of either of those today.

FIATECH is home to a far reaching project, now known as IDS-ADI. The IDS (Intelligent Data Sheet) defines coherent collections of data about classes of equipment. These data sheets include ontologically significant metadata to define the contents and meaning of each attribute. ADI project is an effort to complete and deploy systems based upon...

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When do you want that?

One of the most fundamental acts of negotiating services is when something should occur. One would guess that this has been already well established, well completed. I know I assumed so when I was talking about the fundamental information that we needed to add for scheduling in oBIX 1.1. “You know that thing you click on to put something on your calendar? It is an ICalendar format. Corporate scheduling systems already use it. People already use it. The conference room is already scheduled using it. Let’s use it for scheduling building systems.

I made promises. We’ll be done quickly. Why don’t you use it to add scheduling to OpenADR? Why don’t we use it for scheduling prices. Sounds good, but this simple function, surprisingly, is not yet ready for use....

What would you recommend?

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Divvying Up Grid Interoperability

The NIST Grid Interoperability Workgroups began by splitting into work groups along traditional market segments. I think the initial cuts (I2G, B2G, H2G&V, T&D) (Industry, Building, Home (and vehicle) to Grid, and Transmission & Distribution) were necessary, I think keeping them makes it far too easy to pave the cow paths, to streamline existing market models while allowing minimal room for new markets to develop. As I look across the groups, they feel to me as if they are split up incorrectly. The home deserves the same DR possibilities as does the office. A hospital may want the same grid information as does the data center. The privacy liability incurred by the utility developing intimate knowledge of the home operations may be as great as they would incur in a bank.
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