While smart building technology developments offers greater access to information, it also poses a growing challenge: how to organise the data.

Buildings contain a vast range of hardware and software, much of it proprietary. Ideally, smart building technology allows data from all of these systems to be captured and analysed to afford better management. Sometimes this may be across a portfolio of properties. There are even initiatives, such as the Data Clearing House project in i-Hub, which aggregate data from different property owners in one place, to enable whole-of-sector analysis and independent services that sit on top of this data.

Key to all this is having a standardised methodology for organising the information. This is where data ontologies come in.

Broadly speaking, ontology is a branch of philosophy that looks at how entities are grouped into basic categories, and which of these entities exist on the most fundamental level. Within buildings, it deals with defining the different pieces of equipment and elements, how they connect, and the data they produce.

Questions around data ontologies will be explored in a panel session as part of AIRAH’s Big Data and Analytics Forum on July 22. It will include Evren Korular, M.AIRAH, from Schneider Electric; Richard McElhinney from Project Haystack; and Carl Agar from A.G. Coombs.

Joining this year’s line-up is Carl Agar from A.G. Coombs Advisory to provide insights into the Virtual Buildings Information System.

For more information or to register for the AIRAH Big Data and Analytics Forum go to: www.airah.org.au/BigData/Home/BigData/

For more information on Virtual Buildings Information Systems go to: https://vbis.com.au/