🎧 #011: Cory Mosiman on the state of Haystack, Brick, and ASHRAE 223

“There's many different use cases for the same data, right? So just because someone tags a data set for their use case, doesn't mean it then enables every smart building use case that could possibly use that data.”

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Episode 11 is a conversation with my NREL colleague, Cory Mosiman.

Summary

• Cory and I have these conversations all the time, so we thought it would be fun to press record. Fair warning though, this is the nerdiest episode yet.
• Let’s put that nerdiness in context. Today, in buildings across the world, data is locked up and unable to be used. If we could use it, we could do things like help mitigate climate change, create healthier indoor environments, and automate our buildings is unable to be used.
• People new to the industry often ask why that is… this conversation is part of that answer. We set aside the business reasons of vendor lock-in that have plagued the industry forever. Instead, we dove into the semantic interoperability problem and all of the efforts going on to solve it.
• This includes the open source projects called Project Haystack and Brick. It also includes the proposed ASHRAE standard 223 and associated working group.
• This is a difficult subject to learn and an even more difficult one to convey, so I hope this conversation takes you closer to understand what’s going on as it did for me.

Mentions and Links

1. Project Haystack, Brick, and ASHRAE Standard 223 (3:15)
2. Gabe Fierro of Brick (7:27)
3. BACnet, LonWorks, Modbus (9:24)
4. Autodesk Revit (9:51)
5. COBie (10:11)
6. EnergyPlus, OpenStudio (10:32)
7. gbXML, Green Button XML, ENERGY STAR XML, BuildingSync XML, HPXML (11:00)
8. RDF OWL, RDF SPARQL (30:57)
9. Brian Frank of Haystack (36:24)
10. Steven Bushby (40:02)
11. Joel Bender (41:38)
12. SAREF ontology (43:11)

You can find Cory Mosiman on LinkedIn.

Enjoy!

Music credit: The Garden State by Audiobinger

Disclaimer: James is a researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). All opinions expressed via Nexus emails, podcasts, or on the website belong solely to James. No resources from NREL are used to support Nexus. NREL does not endorse or support any aspect of Nexus.

THE ABOVE AUDIO, VIDEO, SUMMARY, AND LINKS WILL ALWAYS BE FREE. PODCAST DEEP DIVES WITH MY REACTIONS, MY TOP HIGHLIGHTS, AND THE FULL TRANSCRIPT ARE EXCLUSIVELY AVAILABLE TO MEMBERS OF NEXUS PRO.

Here’s this week’s deep dive outline:

• My reaction

• My highlights

  • Why don't control systems have interoperability baked into them already

  • Haystack takes us down the path and allows applications to use the data

  • What Brick brought to the game

  • The difference in goals between Haystack and Brick and 223

  • What 223 is bringing to the game and what they're working on

  • Today's challenge #1: People doing different stuff with the data might tag it differently

  • Today's challenge #2: every company has their own haystack standard

  • The three big opportunities besides 223: Proof between multiple vendors, reference implementations, and tooling

• Full transcript

Get the deep dive