Increasing building transparency and efficiency with open-source ontologies

To help the industry pivot on the fly, Bosch Building Technologies is leveraging digital transformation to make building processes, systems, and utilities more transparent and efficient, all while reducing costs. For buildings to go truly digital, though, they need a common foundation to allow all the interconnected hardware and software to communicate seamlessly. The challenge? Different types of technology often don’t speak the same language, at least not with the same terms and descriptions for the sensors, equipment, systems, and utilities making up a building’s infrastructure. This is the reasoning behind Bosch Building Technologies Ontology Central, a library of open-source ontologies with an in-depth foundation for semantic models that can be reused across buildings, systems, and services. But what does ontology actually provide?

In essence, the Ontology Central library lays a transparent groundwork for efficient buildings by providing consistent, digital descriptions of the physical structure, hardware, sensors, and utilities across a building or group of buildings. Most of this usually takes place on the backend services of a building’s IT infrastructure, which often require time-consuming implementations from a group of specialists and specific vendors with proprietary tools. Just getting everything in the building on the same page, from a technical point of view, requires a series of workarounds and bespoke programming. And if the systems and utilities don’t use the same technical language, it can be incredibly difficult to gain transparency and insight into what’s happening in a building in real-time.

To think about it in human terms, imagine three separate facility teams working across three levels of a building. Only one teams calls a heater an HVAC unit, another team calls it a heater, and another calls it 37B1AZX9. Now try getting those three teams to discuss the heating system in real time. Throw in a few more inconsistent terms, and you would probably have to call in a specialized translator just so the teams can understand each other. Not exactly efficient, is it? With open-source ontologies, the terms and descriptions are the same from the very start. At a technical level, this common ground provides a framework for scalable efficiency across all phases of the building lifecycle.

The vision for the Ontology Central library is to have the greatest impact on the greatest number of people, so it was only natural to develop it as an open-source collaboration between building owners and managers, vendors, service providers, and start-ups. This mass availability can empower the real estate industry to increase efficiency and reduce costs throughout the building lifecycle. During the planning and construction phase, an open-source ontology can allow architects and owners to easily mix and match the hardware and software that best fits the needs of an individual building, while minimizing implementation costs. For ongoing daily operations, a transparent set of ontologies provides the consistent foundation that Artificial Intelligence (AI) needs to draw data from across the building and make predictive suggestions in real time, thus conserving resources while improving the bottom line. And once it’s time for a retrofit, new installations can use the same ontologies to maintain a stable digital ecosystem through the Internet of Things (IoT), only updating the components that are really necessary.

When used for the systems and utilities of a current building, open-source ontologies provide the skeleton of a digital twin for operations. So a real-time, interactive map combining the physical dimensions of the building itself with the data from all utilities and systems. This creates numerous opportunities to increase transparency about what is happening within a building at any point in time, adding a great deal of efficiency to daily operations. And if a certain configuration of hardware and software proves particularly helpful in increasing efficiency in one building, it can be carried over to planning for upcoming buildings, or even applied to and adjusted for retrofits in existing buildings.