Re: [smartgrid-interest] Draft Charter - Energy Market Information Exchange

[Brian Frank <brian@skyfoundry.com>]

Couple of my thoughts since Toby cross-posted some of my oBIX ideas...

I don't suspect that many in this group need to be convinced that technologies like 6LoWPAN create the opportunity to communicate IP all the way out to the edge.� In fact, it is hard to imagine using anything but IP for communication these days - even for sub $10 devices (legacy devices excluded of course).

But just because a 6LoWPAN device speaks IP doesn't necessarily mean that it going to run a SOAP stack:
� - These are typically sub-3$ dollar microprocessors with less than 100KB of memory
� - Low end wireless networks don't run TCP well,� only UDP; this means common techniques for end-to-end security such as TLS are not available
� - Payload size on a 6LoWPAN packet is ideally less than ~80 bytes
� - 6LoWPAN nodes spend most of their time sleeping which makes communication difficult

But these are all surmountable problems if you define an information model which works well end-to-end.� Translating between protocols (HTTP-to-UDP) is pretty easy.� Translating between data encodings is also easy (XML-to-Binary).� But translating between data models is really, really hard and almost always results in a degradation of information.

So my perspective is that the most important task is define the abstract model.� Then you can apply different protocols and encoding as needed as long as everyone is working off the same basic ontology.� 

This is exactly what oBIX does.� It defines a very simple, but powerful meta-model for building models.� The oBIX meta-model is based on type theory that embraces the notion that modeling the real-world is a messy and inexact science.� But it turns out to work really well for simple sensors all the way up to million point SCADA systems.

Brian