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Meta-Morphing Mashup for Self Creation

I am sure my readers think I simply made up these column titles as I attempted to describe the pieces of our digital transformation depicted in several columns of the past.

All these words come from articles, interviews, news releases that appear in our monthly global online resource for large building automation which has evolved to become a staging website for industry thought and evolution. The words Meta-Morphing are no exception, but you will have to read the complete column to find their source and why they make my head explode.

My last column the Transparency and Digital Twin is the New Deal seems to have captured the imagination of many. This next column continues to explore how we might achieve those qualities and the transition to AI, self-learning, and a self-creation world.

The Mashup started with a significant announcement earlier this month;

ASHRAE's BACnet Committee, Project Haystack and Brick Schema Collaborating to Provide Unified Data Semantic Modeling Solution

RICHMOND, VIRGINIA (March 02, 2018) -- The ASHRAE BACnet committee (www.bacnet.org), Project Haystack (www.project-haystack.org) and Brick Schema (www.brickschema.org) announced they are actively collaborating to integrate Haystack tagging and Brick data modeling concepts into the new proposed ASHRAE Standard 223P for semantic tagging of building data.

ASHRAE Standard 223P: "Designation and Classification of Semantic Tags for Building Data" provides a dictionary of semantic tags for descriptive tagging of building data including building automation and control data along with associated systems.

By integrating Haystack tagging and Brick data modeling concepts with the upcoming ASHRAE Standard 223P, the result will enable interoperability of semantic information across the building industry, particularly in building automation.

What the heck does that mean, and how does it help get us to some of the next steps in our transformation?

This article written by our contributing editor Therese Sullivan, who is also the editor of many other industry causes such as Project Haystack, shares her thoughts with the New Deal and starts to unravel the significance of this announcement. Below I share some of her important quotes;

BAS Industry Collaborates On Semantics

When competing open-standards are allowed to proliferate, you get market confusion. So it is great news that those working on semantic interoperability are now actively collaborating under the umbrella of the new proposed ASHRAE Standard 223P for semantic tagging of building data. This collaboration includes the ASHRAE BACnet committee, Project Haystack and Brick Schema.

Project Haystack was early to organize and tackle the challenge of semantic data modeling for buildings, but, awareness of the issue is now mainstream. Claire Rowland, Interaction Design Director, at the well-known global design firm Method, wrote this post about designing a UX for connected embedded hardware, including the following paragraph concerning semantic naming:

“.…At the most basic level, it’s important to give the same features the same name across all interfaces. But even this can be a challenge when the same app needs to support multiple versions of legacy hardware. Perhaps device designers had different ideas about whether ‘auto’ or ‘timer’ was the ‘best’ name for the heating schedule function.”
Rowland, like UX designers everywhere want what Haystack cofounder John Petze describes here:

“The reason that you can point a web browser at someone else’s website to see what they have to say is that we have all agreed upon how website data should be marked-up, or tagged. You and I don’t have to have any pre-negotiations to make that happen. We need the same thing for data coming out of systems and devices. We should be able to get all the data, and it should be easy to interpret when we receive it. It should be marked up with tags that describe what it is. Project-Haystack has been working on that challenge since its founding in 2011.”

By calling the things in our world by a common name that is machine readable many other things start to unravel on our way to the transition to AI, self-learning, and a self-creation world.

Alper Uzmezler has put out an open invitation to join him in developing Project Sandstar, a development effort with the goal of making it easier to semantically tag points and to implement controls.

Sandstar integrates three components into a seamless whole:

Sandstar GPIO engine to handle real/time connectivity to I/O for sensors and actuators activated based on haystack tags;

Sedona to provide real-time programmable control logic;  https://sedona-alliance.org

Haystack to semantically model and configure the control points.https://project-haystack.org

Therese wearing her Project Haystack Hat provides this insight;

Alper is open sourcing the general-purpose I/O engine as well as tag definitions that he developed within his company, Anka Labs.

He is championing a Project Haystack working group, inviting other programmers in the Haystack community to improve and secure the architecture and engine and to expand on the initial tag definitions.

As Project Sandstar evolves it is sure to attract the interest of programmers and product developers from the larger IoT and “maker” communities. With their help, there is potential to expand Project Sandstar to include tagging dictionaries for sensors, output devices and control applications, well beyond HVAC control.

Alper presented an overview and a demonstration of Project Sandstar on a recent ControlTalkNow broadcast. When asked about the state-of-the-art in Intelligent Buildings, he explained, "You need a platform to be able to make corrective changes to the DDC code before you have data streams useful for Machine Learning and AI. Sandstar is that platform."The ultimate goal of Project Sandstar is making it easier for manufacturers to develop new, advanced, cost-effective BMS and IoT devices that work seamlessly in a metadata tag-based environment.

This post from the project haystack site provides insight and the words for my title.

Sandstar integrates sandstar engine, haystack, and sedona into a seamless whole:

Methods:

Device template is created in order to abstract system calls to GPIO, I2C, UART and other hardware level communication. Within this file, we have utilized a tag called “channel”. A zinc in the form of grid with records where “channel” tag which is type number is generated. Within the zinc file we are forming all tags necessary to convert raw data into cur val data form. This consists of tags that define programming data type, port definition, sandstar engine, localization conversion and last regular haystack tags are defined for application abstraction. Sandstar C/C++ engine consumes both files and communicates to both Sedona and Haystack rest api.

Results:

Abstraction in both hardware level and point definition level enables us to generate portable Sedona code. With the abstraction of IO, sedona code can be written in a way it covers all potential input, output and setpoint types. With the power of haystack ops (Rest api), we can add a record to the sandstar engine thus enabling the branch of the Sedona code that is waiting to be activated. We call this feature meta-morphing programming. On the roadmap, having haystack client in sedona will help us to have P2P device communication along with historical data and analytics based control.

Conclusion:

Sandstar project will change how we think of DDC. Major improvements are hardware independent sedona code, historical data based control logic, driver abstraction via haystack can be achieved now. With the improvements to haystack ops where Sedona components can be created changed deleted and linked, artificial intelligence can be utilized to generate and improve upon human generated DDC code.

This may all seem very new to you but improving our control languages has been on the industry agenda since the early days of DDC.  This blast from the past from 2011 speaks to this subject and involves most of the same folks. I find that very interesting that the above commentary is likely just the next chapter of this piece of history.

“The Past and Future of Control Languages” A call to the industry to speed their evolution to open protocol for control languages

From this article from 2008 Alper shares his views,

Future of Building Automation with IP Version 6 & cloud networking Alper Uzmezler, BAS Services & Graphics, LLC.

The BAS industry has seen vast improvements in the last 8 years. Protocol wars have ended during the last couple of years.  Integration became an important factor.  It seems that a majority of the buildings are web enabled.  We have more tools to analyze data and we can communicate better with our buildings.  What does the future hold for the building automation industry?  Before finding out the answers, let’s learn about two new emerging technologies which will revolutionize the building automation industry.

All this history by these industry pioneers leads us to the edge and our meta-morphing mashup.

Of course, we need open edge hardware and open edge software to make this meta-morphing happen but we currently have over six manufacture supporting sedona in addition to Alper's company https://ankalabs.com

Read this interview on how it has happened on the popular inexpensive Raspberry PI Micro PC,

Turning a Micro PC into a Controller  If we can have open software, why not open hardware? - Zach Netsov, Product Specialist, Contemporary Controls

Netsov:  We're huge proponents of the concept of "open control" and built our BAScontrol Series on the idea of open software and free programming tools. The BASpi was the next logical extension of that idea. We started tossing around this idea of making a controller on a micro PC to give home enthusiasts, students, and DIYers a truly open controller they can easily set up and use. If we can have open software, why not open hardware? We’re fans of the Raspberry Pi and we noticed there weren’t any Raspberry Pi daughter boards which support building automation control requirements, specifically 0-10V analog inputs and thermistor inputs. We thought it would be good to make a daughterboard which can be used in building automation systems. Because we had this technology in our BAScontrol products already, we were able to quickly bring this to a Raspberry Pi daughterboard.

Sinclair:  How does a novice get a BASpi and figure out what to do with it?

Netsov:  We’ve updated the BAScontrol Toolset to support the BASpi. The BAScontrol Toolset includes our Sedona Application Editor, our BASemulator, and our BASbackup tools – and it’s available for free. That means BASpi users can download the free BAScontrol Toolset and use it with the BASpi-IO board or BASpi-SYS to teach themselves sequences of operation based on industry-wide concepts such as graphical wiresheet applications – Sedona, and networked automation using the worldwide-accepted industry standard – BACnet. We love Sedona because it’s a drag-and-drop graphical component programming language that’s open, unrestricted and much easier to use than Python or other procedural languages normally used on the Raspberry Pi. BACnet is very powerful for networked control – it gives experienced building automation BASpi users a piece of mind, and to those who are new to the automation world, an insight of what the professionals are doing out in the field. With the BASpi-IO, we have given Raspberry Pi users the ability to learn and implement their own networked control applications.

Our Building Automation Industry has been thinking about this for a while.  I believe that this mashup and new meta-morphing thinking will evolutionize how other industries will connect their standards, and open movements, and expose them to the power of AI; making all that we have machine-readable, unraveling on our transition to self-learning, and a self-creation world.

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