Groups - oBIX Meeting modified

[toby.considine@fac.unc.edu]

oBIX Meeting has been modified by Toby Considine (toby.considine@fac.unc.edu).

Date:  Tuesday, 29 June 2004
Time:  11:00am - 12:00pm Eastern Time

Event Description:
Tridium will be hosting this conference call. 

Phone: 800-838-0546 or 913-905-1404
Passcode: 652627

Agenda:
Agenda: 
Proposed Agenda:

5 Minutes Discussion on Clarification to Charter.  If Anyone has concerns, please submit them in writing to the group, as the attempt to do this as a group was hectic, to say the least.

10 Minutes: Clarification of Scope, Purpose of oBIX

10 Minutes: Summary of Work to Date: Aaron Hansen

5 Action Items from Last Week:
-	(ALL) Proposed clarification of the Charter. Please review and be ready to discuss. Please submit further proposed changes to the group.
-	(Anto) Align verbiage on www.obix.org with public charter information from OASIS.
-	(Ken Wacks) Send a description of the liaison levels with ISO, what they mean, and which is the appropriate level for oBIX at this stage.
-	(Toby) Distribute draft of clarified charter for discussion.
-	(All) prepare to discuss further sub-committee formation. 

-	(All) Consider role of recording secretary for oBIX 


5 minutes: Alliances and relationships: Ken Wacks.  AECXML.  UDDI.

10 Minutes: Approaches and Participation: (Carry-over from last time) – Steering committee, want to be able to discuss issues w/o cluttering up all mailboxes; liaisons, agenda, etc.  Open to any, just a different list?

15 Minutes: Approaches and Participation: (Carry-over from last time)
 
oBIX has already been under way for a year, so there is some culture already in place on the committee that must be relearned for OASIS. Experience has shown that not all members are ready to live in the nitty-gritty of XML, and that other perspectives are necessary to make oBIX be what it should. There is also a strongly felt concern that we provide useful recommendations to users of oBIX as to when and how to use oBIX. We want to get a strong perspective on use cases that Owners Operators, and Tenants would like to get from oBIX, to make sure we continually re-focus on delivering usable value with oBIX. We have also had some participation from several of the 50 different vertical controls markets identified as likely to be in a building. 

To this end, we want to consider the sub-committee structure for oBIX. These subcommittees would allow the more focused members to meet more often on areas of concern, while summarizing back to the overall committee less frequently.

As a starting point, I propose:

oBIX meets once a month.

- The XML Standards sub-committee meets once a week is up and running under Aaron Hansen

-	The Applications and Guidelines sub-committee will discuss when and when not to use oBIX for building controls projects.

-	Roadmap sub-committee As oBIX exposes controls to the enterprise, it grants the enterprise permission to interact with those control systems. This committee will focus on developing use cases and prioritizing development efforts by the other subcommittees.

Other committees:
- Special interest groups meetings (SIGs) for controls vertical industries to clarify the proper abstraction level for each vertical industry. I’d prefer to have more than one vendor on each.  We also should look to existing XML/WSDL from the participants as a starting point.

- Interfaces to define relationships between oBIX and related facilities XML dialects (to date, UDDI, GBXML, EBXML, WSDM)

Of course, the actual subcommittee structure will be determined during open meetings, but something consistent with this structure is anticipated.

5 Minutes: discussion on expanding participation

5 Minutes: Summary and Action Items

Minutes:


Minutes from the OASIS oBIX TC Teleconference
June 29th 2004

Roll call

 

Meeting was convened by
Toby Considine, Chair

 

The roll call
is kept on the TC web site under the meeting record.

http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/obix/event.php?event_id=5362

  

Approval of minutes from
previous meeting

 

Minutes were approved
without discussion.

 

 

Resolution of Issues

The meeting concerned
further organizational issues to get the committee up and going.

Clarification of Charter 

 

It was agreed that all
members would be mailed a copy of the charter locked for annotations.  The
resulting documents would be mailed back to the Chair, merged, and sent out for
discussion at the next meeting.

 

Clarification of Terminology 

 

We wanted to clarify the
terminology that we use.  Many words have quite precise (but different)
meanings to different members of the controls community.  The following
hierarchy of verbs was presented:

 


 Guest Interaction
 Tenant Interaction
 Operation
 Configuration (i.e. loop
     tuning and the like)
 Installation &
     Discovery


 

The following additional
modes were noted outside the hierarchy above:

 


 Enterprise System Interaction
 Peer-To-Peer (other
     control systems) interaction



It was agreed that oBIX was not targeted toward the Discovery, Installation, or
Configuration of a Control System.  oBIX would be an appropriate platform for
all interactions from Operation up. The phrase “supervisory” was rejected as
were several others.

 

Someone (I don’t remember
who) suggested the phrase “Orchestration” – which was acclaimed and drew no
complaints. So there we have it.  oBIX orchestrates interactions between
controls systems and between those control systems and the enterprise and enables
data sharing between them.

 

Summary of work to Date 

 

Aaron Hansen provided a
summary of the history of oBIX as well as the progress of the technical
standards committee to date.

 

The committee to date has
concerned itself with normalizing control points for the enterprise.  To this
end, discussions have centered around modeling points and atomic values.  After
much discussion, three classes of deliverables were defined for oBIX v1.

 


 oBIX Discovery Service:
     the heart of accessing the control systems through enumerating concrete
     types and defining hooks th point services.
 Real time point
     services, enabling the user to get and set Point values within a control
     systems
 Alarms: defining how
     control systems notify the enterprise
 Trend Service:  data
     logging and trending services.


 

Other issues of concern to
the committee to date include Scheduling and Security.  Toby Considine
reiterated his concern that some sort of event scheduling be included as an
early deliverable.

 

Jamie Robinson pointed out
that the discovery service and other aspects should rely on other work defined
by other OASIS committees. We are already working on this, and discussions have
begun.  Chairs of other OASIS groups have been eager to proffer assistance, but
as of yet we have had little to reveal to them about what are vision is.

 

Aaron continued that Brian
Franks was working on a very early proto-standard, what he referred to as a
Straw Man Document, expected to be referenced as oBIX v0.2.  This work is
anticipated complete by the end of July.  

 

We plan to share the Straw
Man Document with other committees to seek their advice on how their standards
will support oBIX.

 

Action Items from last week 

 

- (ALL) Proposed
clarification of the Charter. Please review and be ready to discuss. Please
submit further proposed changes to the group. Still pending.

 

- (Anto) Align verbiage on
www.obix.org with public charter information from OASIS: done. Further
discussion suggested revising and extending the OASIS TC site.  Anto Budjiardo
was proposed as a Web Secretary, able to thereby update the OASIS web site but
spared form duties such as minutes. This passé w/o objection.

 

- (Ken Wacks) Send a
description of the liaison levels with ISO, what they mean, and which is the appropriate
level for oBIX at this stage. See below

 

- (Toby) Distribute draft
of clarified charter for discussion: still to do.

 

- (All) prepare to discuss
further sub-committee formation.  See below.

 

- (All) Consider role of
recording secretary for oBIX 

 

Aaron Hansen provided a
summary of the history of oBIX as well as the progress of the technical
standards committee to date.

 

Alliances and Relationships

 

Ken Wacks reported on the
meeting of  ISO/IEC JTC1 SC25 WG1

 

The following resolution was approved without
objection by the 17 countries present:

 

"SC 25 instructs its Secretariat to
establish formal liaison, external 

liaison category B, with oBIX (Open Building Information xchange) at 

OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of
Structured Information 

Standards), Toby Considine, Chair oBIX
Technical Committee, 

(toby.considin@facilities.unc.edu)."

 

You should be receiving a letter from the SC25
Secretariat confirming 

the establishment of a liaison relationship.

 

More information will be
provided when we have it.

 

Toby Considine summarized
correspondence IAI-AECXML as mediated by Barry Schaeffer.  Some back and
forth has gone on, but the current proposal is as follows:

 

I recommend an MOU with National Institute of
Building Sciences which would include all of the Councils and Committees of
NIBS.  The International Alliance for Interoperability - North America Chapter
operates as a Council within NIBS.  The AECXML Domain is a committee within the
IAI-NA.  The NIBS Facility Maintenance and Operations Committee's OMSI XML
project got NIBS involved with IAI, and there is an informal relationship. The
Facility Information Council, where the National CAD Standard resides, also
supports the IAI.  It makes sense to me to get under the entire umbrella. 

 

IAI is closely aligned with ISO, in particular
STEP.  I don't know much about OASIS, but I think of it as more an IT group
than a building industry group.  I believe the NIBS/FMOC has maintained contact
with OASIS through Mark Crawford of the Logistics Management Institute, Barry
Schaeffer, and perhaps Kent Reed of NIST too.  I am sure about other IAI or
NIBS contacts with OASIS.   

 

The chairs of the UDDI
TC submitted a request that we consider “Explorations of Changes or Extensions
that we may want from to UDDI to meet [the] needs of oBIX”.  As per discussion
above, the first step is the straw man oBIX v0.2.

 

Toby Considine reported
that we are investigating whether any Service Order construct from EBXML
might be useful to oBIX.

 

Formation of Sub-Committees

 

Note: Last meeting, we
created the following subcommittees:

 


 XML Standards
     Committee, Aaron Hansen , Chair.
 Marketing Committee, Anto
     Budiardjo, Chair
     Rob Zivney, Peter Manolescue to join


 

The following new
subcommittees were approved (and their charters as submitted by their chairs)

 

-         
Business Requirements Group As oBIX exposes controls to the enterprise, it
grants the enterprise permission to interact with those control systems. This
committee will focus on developing use cases and prioritizing development
efforts by the other subcommittees.

 

-         
Security Sub-Committee:
Define the necessary extensions to
the core services provided by the oBIX framework that would enable integration,
interoperability and data mining across and between building security systems
and other oBIX based building systems.  The Sub-Committee will also provide an
interface to exchange information with other existing and proposed XML/WS based
initiatives and organizations in the security industry.
Scope: 
The Sub-Committee’s scope will include Access Control, CCTV, Intrusion
Detection, Fire Detection and Life Safety Systems.

Co-Chairs: Peter Manolescue,  Anno Scholten

 

-         
Power Systems Sub-Committee:
This group will address topics related to the systems supporting the management
of electrical power within commercial facilities.
This will include the application topics of energy management, power quality
and power reliability. Equipment covered will include power distribution
assemblies, protective devices, power metering, backup generation equipment and
uninterruptible power supplies. This sub committee will also look to the work
being done in the GridWise organization to drive a common approach.
Chairs: Richard Harwell, Ron Ambrose
(note: first order is to recruit additional industry participants)

 

Note:
for historical reasons, the HVAC industry is largely identical to the XML
Standards Committee.  Aaron will investigate with group whether HVAC Stnadards
Subcommittee is required or useful.

Other Standards to Watch

GridWise, WSDL, WSDM,
UDDI, OPC – XML Alliance

MIMOSA – WS instantiation
of OPC

LONMARK, BACNET 

SIA

KONNEX

ECHONET

IP User Group for
Security:

 

Summary
of Action Items:

 

(Aaron Hansen) – some
discussion of Data Transparency 

(Marketing
Group) Review storefront of oBIX.org

(Toby, Marketing
Group) TC Review OASIS, TC open to public

(Rob Zivney)
SIA Alliance Report & Feedback

(Toby
Considine, Anto Budjiardo) Review public Page

(Aaron Hansen)
HVAC SIG?

(ALL)  Proposed
clarification of the Charter.  Please review and be ready to discuss.  Please
submit further proposed changes to the group.

(Toby) Distribute draft
of  clarified charter for discussion.

(All) Consider role of
recording secretary for oBIX

(Subcommittee Heads) Set
up Subcommittee Sites

(Subcommittee Heads) Subcommittee
PagesReports

 

 

Items for next Agenda:

GridWise (www.gridwise.org)

SIA

 


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