Buildings IOT has announced the release of the OAP (Ontology Alignment Project). This open-source ontology includes a data model for a growing list of systems within the built environment and is foundational for improving building management and operations. The OAP defines both the name and the points associated with building entities as diverse as rooftop units, electric meters, and booster pumps to make their data more readable by machines.

With this crucial first step, Buildings IOT is making it easier and faster for integrators to deploy building management software at scale. As the company puts it, this effort aims to support and extend existing building modeling standards, such as Project Haystack and the Brick Schema, and to make the new schema compatible with real-world integration projects.

In addition to providing standard tags for equipment and devices, the OAP also provides a model for specifying relationships that define how entities within the building’s systems relate to each other. For example, a reference can designate that an air handling unit is supplying air to a variable air volume unit. By designating these relationships within the data model, system-based and root cause analytics can be applied more efficiently.

With the ability to normalize and standardize building and IoT data, the OAP enables the programmatic application of analytics, user interfaces, fault detection and diagnostics (FDD), and other use cases that leverage building data for more effective management and operations.

The members of the OAP working group actively participate in other industry forums and groups and will expand on existing taxonomies to support real-world integration and technology needs.