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Building APIs

Urban areas account for 1.5% of global land use. We spend most of our time in buildings, while at home, work or shopping and at the library.

Buildings play a large role in our personal and professional lives. Many buildings already have automated heating, air, electrical, water and other system. Many of these building manufacturers are understanding the importance of allowing API access to their hardware and software.

Imagine if all of our buildings thought for themselves, and were able to teach us to reduce energy consumption, diagnose problems in real-time, allowing them to self correct when necessary or call a service provider when they need repair or tuning.

In this section I will be tracking on news and companies that are doing interesting things around building and home maagement or automation APIs, while also sharing blog analysis as well.

Standard Energy Efficiency Data APIs For Buildings

(Posted on 01-21-2014)

The team over at Panoptix turned me on to the the Standard Energy Efficiency Data (SEED) platform being developed over at the Department of Energy, which aims to be an API for collecting, storing and analyzing building energy performance data. It appears that DOE is looking to develop open source software that state and local governments can use to manage energy efficiency across their buildings. I like the approach to develop an open source, API driven platform that can set the tone for how data can be collected, managed, and shared. I think this is a great way to lead......read more.


JCI & Panoptix APIs: Write APIs Are Much Harder Than Read APIs

(Posted on 01-20-2014)

When I last talked with the Panoptix API team over at Johnson Controls (JCI), they were working hard on new features, including the possibility of writing data to the building efficiency API(s). A year later, I wanted to see where the team was at with their API efforts and was intrigued to learn that their work to make their API writable hadn’t gone exactly as they had planned. On the surface it sounds like an easy task. You can pull data from an API, now using POST, PUT and DELETE you should be able to write data back into the......read more.