An Exclamation on XML

A big buzz at the AHR Expo was talk of XML and what it may mean for the controls industry. As a pre-session to its day long symposium, Dallas-based Clasma assembled a number of integrators and movers and shakers in the real estate community to discuss trends driving what they feel is a “convergence” of technologies—most notably IT and mechanical/electrical systems—that will significantly alter the way buildings are operated in the near future.

“There’s a lot of confusion out there right now due to the enormity of the changes happening,” says Anto Budiardjo, president of Clasma, the symposium’s sponsor and the organization that produces the Builconn show.

Just a short time later, OBIX, the Open Building Information Exchange, a fledgling coalition of building controls companies, presented their plan for launching a new standard for Internet-based XML communication for building control systems.

According to Trane’s Paul Ehrlich, the group’s chairman, the notion of implementing an industry standard using XML is not to replace BACnet or LonWorks, but rather to simply serve as a vehicle for both protocols to deliver data from those systems to wherever necessary.

Ehrlich said the group hopes to have a draft completed by the end of the year and a rough draft up by April. Visit www.OBIX.org for more, including an open forum.

At the symposium itself, co-sponsored by the Continental Automated Buildings Assn., speakers outlined a number of issues, including education, coordination and a need for standards.

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