BuildingDepot: an extensible and distributed architecture for building data storage, access and sharing

Enabled by various sensing and data networking devices, modern buildings are beginning to generate extraordinary amounts of sensory data. The organization and availability of this data is currently a challenge, especially for researchers who seek to devise intelligent data-driven methods for energy efficient use of building systems. Most current solutions tend to be ad-hoc and proprietary, and thus do not support mechanisms for easy data acess and sharing. In this paper we present BuildingDepot, an extensible and distributed system for building-related data with scalable data storage, ease of data access, fine-grained data sharing and access control as first class design principles. We focus on the overall architecture and highlight how our own experiences running multiple building deployments have shaped our design decisions. We have implemented a prototype of BuildingDepot, along with connectors to several standard energy management systems, showing how it enables enterprises to incrementally deploy the system as well as Get and Put data into BuildingDepot using a REST-style API. We have released it as open source software to the building research community.