Building Expert Folksonomy

I gave an enjoyable talk yesterday at the School of Information and Library Science (SILS). It was not policy, and it was not a plan; it was a variant of my usual talks in a venue that regularly hears talks about standards and open source issues.

For those who haven’t looked at library schools recently, they are not what they once were. When I was an undergrad, I am not sure if there was an computer in the school. I took a course there a decade ago, when the hot skill for new librarians was the skills to set up a small network and a connection to the internet. Aside from finally getting all seven layers of the ISO protocol stack down cold, there were few surprises.

Today’s library science is all about classification of data in a variety of ways to enable quick discovery of meaning. Research posters on semantics and ontologies covered the hallways. Video catalogues vied with personal medical record analysis. Privacy and easy access vied in the same application. Let those guys in computer science come with a better hash table to index the bits, they seemed to say. We, in libraries and information will catalogue the world and categorize meaning.

The audience was attentive and the post talk was long. There was more to it than the Schools interest in building their own new building, pushing the standards of sustainable design. The were interested in a new pool of data sets to make into information, By discovering meaning, they could discover service and define performance. The questions were quite different then I usually get.

One doctoral candidate, Terrell Russell, is working on contextual authority tagging, or what he describes a cognitive authority through folksonomy. Folksonomy is a newly trendy word describing approaches that most of us use every day. Google, for example, became the best search engine by ranking each page by how many other pages referenced it; the most referenced page, must be the best page for a topic, and so comes out first. This ranking is performed not be some formal scheme, not by some learned discourse, but by folk (think folk tale or folk music). Folksonomy, then, is a classification discovered by referencing peers.

Contextual authority is the authority that is recognized in a special context. We acknowledge authority in some contexts by licensing and education (MD). In other areas, we acknowledge authority by election or appointment (Judge). Authority through folksonomy asks the question “who would you turn to explain widgets”. Russell wants to capture this cognitive authority, and rank it, Google style, to find experts.

Of course, this is a glib summary of some detailed work that was heard in passing. If you are itnerested in this, use your favorite web content context authority to find Terrell Russell.  It won't take ling.

I began thinking about buildings, and agents, and emergent behaviors. What is the role of experts in the embedded world. Are the experts agents, or are the experts operators? Can a power provider recognize the best experts, and recommend them to others? Would building owners accept these recommendations only if the owner fit a similar social model to that of owner of the building operated by the recommended expert?

Storage and the Failure of Energy Markets.

As we build markets between intelligent buildings and the intelligent grid, there are two paths we can take to demand-response. One imposes central control, and is essentially the voluntary acceptance of a specific brown out with some local control of timing. This mode is traditional, as when the power company turns off the home hot water heater. The other path creates market mechanism to encourage local energy arbitrage between time-dependent markets. I’m betting that the second offers considerably more potential.

In today’s public concept and in the political world, the simple load shedding model is the only one. When you get a price signal, you should turn off your A/C. No hot showers in the afternoon. We will be happy to sweat in the dark because we will be saving the planet. Belief in the sustainability of this model right up there with the sustainability of the economic model posed by the red-suited man at the local grocery store this last weekend. It is a desire for how one wishes things worked trumping how things actually do. Very few people not already in monasteries will commit to long term privation, however slight.

Arbitrage is a little harder to think about but easier to sustain. Arbitrage between time markets lets buildings not only respond to times of congestion and shortage, but to also take advantage of times of abundance, to use resources that currently go to waste.

In simplest terms, arbitrage between time markets is the decision by the building operator to buy power when it is cheap, and to refrain from buying power when it is expensive. It no longer matters how inefficient local storage of energy is, just whether that inefficiency is less than the price differential. If I can make 50% return on investment by buying at night rather than during the day, then a 40% loss due to storage inefficiency is inconsequential.

Early adopters will pay a premium for this ability, but will also earn a premium as one of the few able to shed the load. As the market develops, both premiums will come down, as storage becomes more efficient ad as the market broadens, driving prices at both times toward the mean.

The largest barrier to large-scale adoption is the systematic under-pricing of power during peak use. This failure of pricing is yet another symptom of a market that has always foisted it costs off on others. Dirty coal plants push the costs of generation off on those downwind. Storm recovery costs push poor capital allocation and sub-market labor contracts into cost recovery allowed by the utilities commission. Brownouts push the costs of poor pricing strategies onto the general public; except during system failure, every brown-out is a failure of pricing. These systematic failures are predictable symptoms of an industry that has been a regulated monopoly managed for cost recovery for the last 80 years.

Proper pricing will validate and reward the energy storage market. Owners will embrace energy storage when they can see clean numbers from the market. Energy storage will flood the market when the owners want it.

Energy storage is coming. I ask you, my readers, what energy storage strategies do you think will be the early winners? I have some ideas that I will share this weekend.

Discovering the Unseen World through Standards

The engineered world is invisible and uncontrollable. Established business practices limit access to information about capital assets. We can address pressing needs in energy and environment while increasing amenities if we can improve decision making. We can address pressing needs by making fact-based decisions about capital facilities. There is great opportunity in applying IT best practices to the engineered world

Traditional practices lose information at every stage of design, construction, and operation. Programming, design, construction, and operations are closed silos. An integrated life-cycle information model standard is our best hope of addressing these issues. It reduces cost while speeding construction. It enables feedback from actual operations to future designs. This IT-based standard is called NBIMS.

Higher performing buildings will require abstract interoperable standards. Traditional control protocols are too concrete and to specific for anyone other than experts. Standard interfaces to control systems are the beginning of an answer. Such interfaces require that the system integrator be a new trade in every construction project. These interfaces will leverage the IT principles from Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

Smart buildings must partner with an intelligent power grid to solve the biggest energy issues. Building operations use 40% of the energy in North America, and 62% of the energy on the power grid. We can save 25%-50% of this energy use by enabling buildings to be responsive to and interactive with their occupants. The power grid can save similar amounts by using standards-based interactions with smart buildings to improve operating efficiency.

Poor data sharing in capital assets are at the heart of some very large societal problems. Open standards the promote interoperability address each of these problems while opening up opportunities for innovation and new markets.

Turn-Over and Operations of the NBIMS Building

In a previous post, (Building Information Modeling),I described Building Modeling, the Building Information Model, and the difference between them. I later (NBIMS during Building Design and Construction) described why the owner is benefits from the use of BIM during building acquisition. Here I will describe how the use of BIM affects maintenance and operations of the new facility.

It is difficult to make effective use of the shelf of binders handed over with each building as an operating manual. Recently services have arisen that offer to put these documents in electronic form. All documents are placed in Acrobat (PDF) format and delivered on a DVD. It is not clear to me that a DVD with several hundred PDF files is much more useful than that old shelf of binders.

NASA attacked this problem by extending NBIMS into maintenance and operations. The Common Operations Building Information Exchange (COBIE) is an initiative to codify the electronic handover of information from NBIMS to operations. COBIE defines formats for transmission of maintenance schedules, spare parts information, and system schematics. COBIE defines a standard for direct import of this information into Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS).

The part of COBIE that I like best is that it defines metadata to link system commissioning reports to the original design in NBIMS. Commissioning is the process whereby operations verifies that they have gotten what the design promised. For now, COBIE lets commissioning reports be linked directly to the CMMS. Even if they are only hand written, they can be scanned and be linked automatically to work orders on that equipment using that metadata. For the first time, maintenance personnel can have direct access to information on how each system performed originally.

The next generation of COBIE will make this link tighter. The energy models will become the formal basis for intelligent commissioning. The information from the energy model will travel though the construction process into operations through COBIE. This may lead to automated commissioning. If we can automate commissioning off of live systems data, we can extend it though the life of the building. Perpetual Commissioning directly from automated systems will be the next great leap in building efficiency. On-line analysis of building performance as well as providing a hook for new performance approaches.

Next Generation systems envision agile interaction between disparate building systems through high level abstract interfaces. Such interfaces hide the inner complexity of systems and enable interaction with other systems without extensive integration. Systems exposing such interfaces can be quickly re-combined without expensive re-integration.

As we begin designing building systems based on standard abstract models, and as these systems are described by energy models, we create the abstract interfaces for agile interoperation and cooperation of systems. This approach is required for such initiatives as the Zero Energy Building and GridWise energy distribution. If you want to read about them , well, read the rest of this blog….