oBIX and CABA

Toby....as CABA is the founding organization of oBIX, we are pleased 
to hear of the continued good work with oBIX.  We also hope you are able to 
provide an update report to the CABA Intelligent & Integrated Buildings 
Council. We have attached the agenda as other people involved with oBIX may want 
to participate in this important Council meeting as a guest.

 

We look 
forward to having you on the call.

 

Regards,

Ron 
Zimmer

CABA 
President & CEO

www.caba.org

 

From: Brian Frank [mailto:] 

Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 11:53 AM
To: Considine, 
Toby (Campus Services IT); 
Cc: 

Subject: RE: [obix] We need to get moving on 
ICALENDAR Binding

The current idea is to 
define a subset of ICalendar used by most people and define a clean mapping to 
the oBIX model.

 

The translation b/w 
ICalendar and oBIX would be machine processable, so client/servers could support 
both.

 

From: 
Considine, Toby (Campus Services IT) [mailto:] 

Sent: Thursday, October 09, 
2008 10:49 AM
To: 

Cc: 
Subject: [obix] We need to get moving on 
ICALENDAR Binding

 

I 
found a few similar efforts today.

 

http://68.142.116.68/docs/cd/B25553_01/calendar.1012/b25488/toc.htm

 

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa564690(EXCHG.80).aspx

 

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa564509(EXCHG.80).aspx 

 

Everywhere, folks are dancing around solving this 
problem. Bob is Right, we need to be based on ICALENDAR, but what does this 
mean?

 

I 
have gotten several suggestions for shims, or embedding XSLT in WS-*, or… but I 
get no answers, only chewing gum and bailing wire. ICALENDAR allows all sorts of 
schedules, ranging from single events to 3rd Tuesday of the month, 
even exceptions for months that have a 5th Tuesday. It also 
understands time zones, while enabling you to schedule a single  event that 
will occur at 8:30 AM local time at every office around the world. It is 
reasonably flexible and complete. On the other side, we have ad hoc formats that 
might have a beginning time and a duration only. BPEL does not have, AFAIK, any 
good way to handle the repeating formats, the indefinite formats, etc. I have 
found no actual standard that is anything like it in XML. I have even had some 
feelers out to W3C folks and the silence is, well, silent.

 

http://www.newdaedalus.com/articles/2008/10/3/when-do-you-want-that.html 

 

We 
all know the natural and easy use case for oBIX that looks like “Conference room 
scheduled for 17 people at 3:00, tell building systems to establish 
temperature/humidity/warm up equipment by 3:00. Ventilation adequate for 17 
people and continue to do so for the full hour”. 

 

Grid-based Demand/Response *could* work on BPEL or something like BPEL, 
but customers are not necessarily buying in to these transactions. It seems 
somehow less elegant.

 

Exchange or Work Orders (OSCRE) and exchange of Medical 
Appointments could use something like this.

 

Emergency response, especially predictions of storm 
events could benefit from this. I can imagine a variant of HAVE that predicts 
availability tomorrow based upon Maintenance Schedules.

 

Green 
Grid scenarios are easy to imagine. Would transformer reliability estimates be 
sent with maintenance schedules for reduced capacity?

 

Etc.

 

Many 
of these areas of work, these domains, do share information about planned events 
with each other, but not as a direct control process. 

 

Alongside the scheduling moment, there is the question 
of payload…

 

There 
are only two real options.

 

1)            
ICALENDAR is a full fledged XML data type, and so can get passed in its current 
format

2)            
ICALENDAR must have a standard transformation, referenced by 
all.

 

The 
first has a certain simplicity to it, and one could imagine easily scraping some 
sort of existing Calendar to add some building commands and go, as a 
shim.

 

The 
second feels like a better final solution, but it has another question. 

 

A)           
Is the contract/behavior/event inside or alongside the ICAL. Just as an event 
now is inside the Schedule, I could imagine an [oBIX Contract] inside a event. 

B)            
Does the event have a reference to an external contract, an internal link? One 
could imagine invoking one process to occur at 7 times, by re-using the link ID. 
In the grid-aware scenario, we could imagine 7 energy usage scenarios, spead 
over multiple schedules, and bidding alternative const 
proposals…

C)            
Calendar and other contract exist alongside each other inside some higher-order 
envelope.

 

Am I 
missing something?

 

tc

 

"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to 
one who is striking at the root." -- David Thoreau

  
  

    
      
Toby Considine

      
Chair, OASIS oBIX 
      TC
Facilities 
      Technology Office
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, 
      NC

    
      
  

    
      
Email: Toby.Considine@ 
      unc.edu
Phone: (919)962-9073 

      
http://www.oasis-open.org 
      
http://www.NewDaedalus.com

 

 

IIBC Meeting Agenda.doc