Background

The Last Big Thing

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Developers of the Internet of Things always seems to be moving into the last big thing—at least as far as communications expectations and protocols. Too often security is an afterthought, something that can be bolted on afterward.

I often have to design secure communications for new deployments on a University campus. Many new roll-pits are still using RESTfull JSON. Remote systems often transfer telemetry to the cloud using unencrypted FTP. OpenADR generally uses reverse polling because corporate security won’t let…

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The Right Time at the Right Place

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Smart Energy uses schedule negotiation and schedule coordination to operate systems and equipment at the right time to take maximum advantage of variable energy supplies. As the internet of things grows up, it will move from gathering data from sensors to coordinating things to enhance our lives. The future of business breaks down into smaller entities with stronger missions that coordinate activities over time to support customers as if by a single business, only better. We all took steps closer to these seemingly simple coordination results, at a meeting at AOL headquarters.

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Smart Energy with a little bit of Seoul.

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My visit to Seoul this month was fascinating. The country of Korea built its infrastructure essentially from scratch in the last 50 years, and in doing so was able to use modern technology to challenge some fundamental assumptions that we make in the USA. IP-based telephony predominates based on pervasive free Wi-Fi. Custom tailors use radical outsourcing mediated by IT to provide near-instant services. The National Virtual Power Plant (NVPP) is as up-to-date as any, while using big-data tools in ways not often seen here. There is a desire to embrace the new without fear that seems young and fresh in the way the US often does not. But somehow, the single observation that stays with me is how the use of IT to challenges our assumptions about natural monopolies....
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BSI and a blast from the past

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Every now and then I run across an old email that I have long forgotten, but speaks to my current activities. I think that this comment, written long ago in the oBIX forum speaks to something I need to return to. Jon recently gave me and WS-Calendar and EMIX some excellent advice on on creating standards for re-use and extension.

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Considine, Toby (Facilities Technology Office)
Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2005 6:36 AM
To: 'jon.bosak@sun.com'
Cc: 'Grobler, Francois ERDC-CERL-IL'
Subject: RE: oBIX Guiding Principles

 

There are parts of Control Systems that are very business oriented. If an embedded control system detects that it needs maintenance, and can submit a maintenance request to an identified partner, clearly that work order looks like a normal business transaction.

Meeting and occupancy schedules might look like UBL (room will be occupied tomorrow from 2-4; use oBIX to inform HVAC, Access Control, Intrusion Detection, A/V management control systems. Read the Electric Meter before and after the meeting). Does the UBL standard extend the ICAL standard, or subsume it or...? Clearly, there is a benefit for scheduling functions to re-use commonly implemented scheduling requests.

These functions are in the future. What oBIX has to start with doing is exposing the event driven world of controls to the enterprise. For the most part, this starts with state. What are all the room temperatures on the 3rd and 4th floors? For how many hours did the compressors run today?Which areas of the building are currently secured? Some of this information is creeping into QOS agreements in real estate, and so intersects with the work of OSCRE (Open Systems for Commercial Real Estate). To my knowledge, UBL does not really include the nomenclatures for this because this is outside of the normal business functions. Am I wrong? Can you refer me to any relevant portions of UBL?

I think an early use for oBIX will be to provide a platform on which GRIDWISE (www.gridwise.org) type applications are built. That may be the first place where standard UBL functions hit, as price incentives are offered to buildings on the spot market to forefend brown-outs and the like. That feels more like bid/delivery/request rebate.

The construction industry has long had a separate open standard for construction documents, known as the IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) developed by the International Association for Interoperability (http://www.iai-international.org/iai_international/) and already required in many international construction projects. The IFC space includes construction documents, spatial data, spatial modeling, etc. The EU, in particular, leans heavily on this ISO specification, particularly in the Nordic countries. The largest landlord in the world, the GSA, has mandated that all transmittals for the design, construction, and acceptance of buildings. The closely related GBXML (Green Building XML) is a lightweight variant of IFCXML focused more on performance issues. GB Modeling, using GBXML for transferring building performance data, is required for those projects that wish to be designated as compliant with programs using words such as "sustainable" and "LEEDS". We have long considered that IFCML and the closely related GBXML were our most important shared spaces. Is there a defined interface/mapping between IFCXML and UBL?

Thanks for your comments

 

tc

 

-----Original Message-----
From: jon.bosak@sun.com
Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 9:20 PM
To: Considine, Toby (Facilities Technology Office)
Subject: Re: oBIX Guiding Principles

| G) If, as seem likely, this document is adopted as an OASIS standard,
| I recommend that we steal freely from this document, reusing as much
| as we can in our rules for developing subsidiary oBIX services as well
| as in the core document. It is well written and defends its decison
| in a language that is focused and apropriate for the enterprise
| developer.

Since UBL is probably going to become the dominant standard for international trade documents, why don't you just adopt the UBL schemas and have done with it? After all, UBL is based on a pretty widely adopted specification (xCBL 3.0) that was developed specifically for electronic marketplaces. If there are any data elements missing from UBL 1.0 that are needed for oBIX, we can probably include them in UBL 1.1.

 

Jon