The ASHRAE SSPC-135 committee in charge of maintaining the ASHRAE BACnet standard is proposing to use tags to add semantic information to BACnet objects and applications (see ASHRAE public review draft document BSR/ASHRAE Addendum ba to ANSI/ASHRAE Standard 135-2012...). Part of this could involve publishing an ASHRAE standard set of tags along with common collections of the tags associated with applications that may be managed by BACnet devices. It could be helpful to the industry to use common tag names for common meanings between Project Haystack and ASHRAE standard 135. In addition to the tag names published by Project Haystack, additional tag names may be published by ASHRAE since BACnet extends well beyond HVAC applications. The main issue I see with doing this is a legal one. The SSPC-135 committee understands that ASHRAE will copyright any work we produce. In addition, it may also be copyrighted by ANSI. The SSPC-135 work can contain one or more Attribution Notices and/or references to other organizations. The question is if this would be sufficient and satisfactory for Project Haystack and the AFL 3.0 license. There also may be legal documents that ASHRAE may require that Project Haystack would be required to agree to before we could proceed. I am a member of the ASHRAE SSPC-135 committee, but not a lawyer. Please let me know if it may be possible to work toward common tag names so we don't fragment our common use cases unnecessarily.

Hi Cliff,

I don't see any issues. Everything we have done is under a very permissive license to make it easy to share in other standards or bodies of work. So I don't see any problem using anything we have along with a simple Attribution. But feel to contact me directly if we need additional discussion.

We would be delighted to work with the ASHRAE committee to ensure we achieve maximum reuse across the two projects.

Sounds excellent! I am assuming you have the position/authority to make this kind of statement/committment (ASHRAE always wants legal sign-off on anything they get involved with) - (I have no idea what the structure/administration of Project Haystack is like). If I can get the time to start putting a proposal document together for BACnet, there should be a way to keep you "in the loop" so we stay in agreement. Cliff

Hi Cliff,

Thanks for contacting Project Haystack on behalf of ASHRAE.

Last year Project Haystack formed a non-profit corporation to formalise the processes and organisation of our efforts in standardizing semantic modelling.

As such we now have a Board of Directors which a number of early adopters of Project Haystack have become part of. As a board member I am more than happy to assist in any coordination between our organisations however in the first instance the best person to contact for official sign-off on any legal issues would be John Petze, President, Project Haystack Corporation ([email protected]).

I know John will respond to you directly but I ([email protected]) am also able to assist you in directing your enquiries.

As a founder and driver of the technical development of Project Haystack Brian Frank is the best person to coordinate technical discussions with in the first instance. There are a number of us, myself included, who collaborate with Brian on the technical development of Haystack modelling and any implementations thereof.

I would also like to echo Brian's sentiments regarding working with ASHRAE, this is a great opportunity for both organisations to develop the use of semantic modelling in our industries.

Furthermore Brian is absolutely right regarding the openness of our model, we are ready, willing and able to work with just about anyone who has an interest in furthering the adoption of semantic models for building systems of all kinds.

We look forward to further collaboration and discussions as things progress.