I have been quiet here for too long, and have made a New Year’s resolution to get back to writing. Many of my recent projects I cannot write about, for competitive or contractual reasons. Still, there are some big themes coming to light, ones that I have been writing about for years, and that are now hitting the market....
Read MoreCOBIE
Finding a Needle in the Internet of Things (part 2)—Buildings and Building Systems
In a previous post, I described how vCards are used throughout standards-based scheduling and calendaring systems. Many different vCard standards coexist in today’s organizations. I also described how directory services, especially LDAP (the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol), are the well-established means to enable wide secure access to the information in vCards. In this post I discuss current efforts that will expand these existing standards to support buildings and their systems.
Read MoreTiny BIM Here and Now
The use of Building Information Models (BIM) has transformed the way that buildings are designed and constructed. Those projects that commit fully to their use deliver higher quality buildings at a lower price. Finith Jernigan has written on how using even incomplete or partial BIM can provide worthwhile results, an approach he describes in his well-regarded book “Big BIM, Little BIM.” While traditional of Big BIM requires a strong commitment and organizational change, Little BIM requires a smaller commitment, and can offer an organization just starting to consider the use of BIM advantages in planning, design, and in operations. I am not going to summarize Jernigan here—the book is small enough and valuable enough that you should just ahead and read it. In this post, today, I am going to write about something smaller, and something that can reduce costs and improve efficiency. Today, I am considering Tiny BIM.
Work Plan for oBIX 2.0
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...