By: Mary Kate McGowan, Associate Editors, News
From eSociety, March 2018
The ASHRAE BACnet Committee is working with two other organizations to further standardize and unify semantic information used for describing data of the digital representation of buildings and their automation and control systems.
The collaboration with Project Haystack and the Brick Initiative will combine their respective semantic tagging and building data modeling concepts into the new proposed ASHRAE Standard 223P, Designation and Classification of Semantic Tags for Building Data.
BACnet was created to be an international standard for interoperable building automation and controls networking, and this new development will add to that, said Bernhard Isler, Member ASHRAE, chair of the ASHRAE BACnet Committee.
In addition to being responsible for the maintenance of the ASHRAE BACnet Standard 135 and its conformance testing companion Standard 135.1, the BACnet Committee is in charge of creating the initial version of the proposed ASHRAE Standard 223P. For the use of 223P in BACnet, the committee will draft an addendum to the BACnet standard to define how 223P will be used.
The collaboration will result in unification and standardization enabling interoperability on semantic information across the building industry, particularly in building automation. The unified effort is meant to ease the exchanging of data over established communication protocols like Haystack web services or BACnet, and when applied on data stored in databases and cloud applications, will support machine interpretation of the semantics of such data.
Standard 223P is set to provide a dictionary of semantic tags, such as those used on articles of news websites, for descriptive tagging of building data including building automation and control data along with associated systems.
“We want to define the dictionaries on logical level from an application domain viewpoint. Their particular use in protocols and data will be defined by other standards and consortia. For example, the BACnet standard will see an addendum defining the use of these dictionaries in BACnet and in BACnet Web Services,” said Isler.
The goal for ASHRAE Standard 223P is to be adopted as an ISO standard, said Isler. The first public review of the initial draft of 223P is expected to be in late 2018.
Standard 223P is meant to complement and aid the use of BACnet and building data in general, according to Isler.