• Embed Doc
  • Copy Link
  • Readcast
  • Collections
  • CommentGo Back
Download
 
 0
 
Snapshot
Transparency & Innovation: Open Data For Green Buildings
By: Bomee JungFor: The Sallan FoundationDate: July 1, 2009
 
1
 
© 2009 The Sallan Foundation, Inc. All rights reserved.http://www.sallan.org
 
 
Snapshot
Transparency & Innovation: Open Data For Green Buildings
I'm not old enough to have enjoyed the first hey-day of energy-efficiency and alternative power  back in the 70's and 80's, but I do love chocolate and have a vivid recollection of the Reese'sPeanut Butter Cups commercials from those days. There were several variations, but basically, a person holding a chocolate bar runs into a person holding a open jar of peanut butter, causing thechocolate bar to drop into the peanut butter. They exclaim in dismay: — “You got peanut butter in my chocolate!” — “You got chocolate in my peanut butter!”But, as the slogan goes, they discover that “two great tastes that taste great together”, and candylovers everywhere rejoice in the finding. Not unlike the chocolate-peanut butter collision, two transformative movements of our time are poised to slam together into a concoction no less delightful than the Peanut Butter Cup(particularly to green enthusiasts of geekly tendencies): the Open Data movement and high- performance green building.
Smart Machines and Smart Data
This section gets a little geeky, perhaps even a bit Sci-fi, but bear with me.
You might think of the Open Data movement as a key piece of the next iteration (Web 3.0) in theevolution of the information technology that brought us email, hypertext and the World WideWeb (collectively Web 1.0), Youtube, blogs like this one, and iPhone apps (Web 2.0).There are literally shelves of books written on this topic, but to boil it down to a few sentences:Web 1.0 arose from open access at the physical and networking levels (the laying of cables, andTCP/IP and an alphabet soup of its friends that allowed networks to find and talk to each other).Web 2.0 is about open access to Web-based applications (via Application ProgrammingInterfaces — APIs) and some data via data feeds (the RSS feed of this blog, for example). APIsand data feeds allow folks other than those who came up with a particular tool (say, GoogleMaps) to tap into its capabilities and combine it with some other set of information (say, tweets)about the passing of Michael Jackson), and output something entirely new and unanticipated bythe original authors (The Michael Jackson Tributes Twitter Map).According to the gurus (and who’s more guru than Tim Berners-Lee, the “father of the WorldWide Web”), Web 3.0 will be about getting machines to smarten up and give us useful,actionable information by “understanding” vast amount of data and how they relate to each other.As much as I love my computers, they’re really not all that smart at the moment. When I google“building”, for example, what the computer “sees” is ‘b-u-i-l-d-i-n-g’. It doesn’t know if I mean
 
2
 
© 2009 The Sallan Foundation, Inc. All rights reserved.http://www.sallan.org
 
 
Snapshot
Transparency & Innovation: Open Data For Green Buildings
the verb or the noun, and if I were to say “green building”, it doesn’t know that those two wordstogether connote a particular paradigm in construction and management. When it shows me adson LEED exam prep courses, that’s because a person somewhere told it to display those ads whenthe text “green” and “building” appear next to each other in a search request, and if the top searchresult happens to be USGBC, it’s only because that’s the one most clicked on by other peoplewho searched for “green building”.The amazing thing that Web 3.0 (Semantic Web) proposes to do is to let computers “understand”meaning, not just “see” text. In the 3.0 world (year after next?) the computer would know that“buildings” are things that take up space and have attributes that distinguish them from other things that take up space, like cats or shoe boxes.When my iPhone gets really smart and Semantic Web-enabled, it ought to be able to deliver user-centric, context-sensitive information, doing all the tedious correlation of information behind thescenes in its little machine brain, without any help from me, the user. For example, when I land inAlmaty, Kazakhstan, it could present me with a map of the high-performance green buildingswithin walking distance of my hotel, show me who designed them, and let me send dinner invitations to the ones who aren’t Sir Norman Foster.When my iPhone goes looking for green buildings in Almaty, it needs to be able to access asource of data that identifies itself as representing buildings in the real world and gives theappropriate amount of detail so that the iPhone can figure out that I might be interested in it.Actually, today’s machines are plenty smart. What’s needed for Web 3.0 is smarter data, and awhole lot of it. For example, a publicly accessible semantic dataset published by the localuniversity on the Almaty building stock might include an entry like:
<building><building:name>Almaty Twin Towers</building:name><building:heat-index>3 BTU/SF/HDD </building:heat-index><building:designed-by><person><person:name>Norman Foster</person:name></person></building:designed-by></building>
Thus, when my iPhone finds this bit of information out in the Web, it can tell that the item relatesto a Building, that it has a name, a heating performance index that is very low (and thus “green”),and that it is associated with an item of type Person, which in turn has a name of ‘NormanFoster’. Let’s assume that somewhere out there is another document that describes what attributesitems of type Building or type Person can have, and that the iPhone knows to go looking for more
of 00

Leave a Comment

You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...
You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...