Join us at a global LF Energy Technical Architecture Virtual Workshop

Workshop
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The event is free. Last 5 hours. Begins at 14:00 CEST. Register here.

This workshop is a creative, online event geared towards enterprise architects, digital technology specialists, and developers. The goal is to share the work of the last four months in building and developing the technical, functional, security, and data architectures that will provide guidance and direction for the LF Energy community. We are building and developing all of these assets in public and encourage your participation and comments. Join us.

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The event date is Wednesday 8 July 2020.

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You are so right!!!

July 8th. 14:00-19:00 CEST. Virtual. Register!

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Report on the data architecture track

The LF Energy project held this technical workshop yesterday. About 115 people attended. The agenda is here. I participated in the data architecture track. Here are a few impressions.

This Linux Foundation project builds on earlier projects, including the Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) project which earlier brought together the car makers in south Asia to cooperate on information technology in the face of competition from Google and Uber over autonomous vehicles.

More specifically, the LF Energy project is currently building an industry consortium to define digitalization for the power sector based on open standards and open implementations. See Biddle (2020) and Ward (2014) for background. The LF Energy project envisages around 80% cooperation and 20% competition.

The workshop consisted of the following tracks:

  • data architecture
  • security framework
  • IT infrastructure
  • asset monitoring
  • power industry automation systems (CoMPAS project)
  • digital twins
  • virtual power plants and microgrids

As noted, I attended the data architecture track. Most discussions referred to the IEC common information model (CIM) at some point. The CIM is public but not open, at least not in its entirety. The Dutch DSO Alliander have been developing a gas sector extension, which might be of interest to this community. There is also an open source CIM to OWL conversion tool, but I missed the details.

The data architecture group have prepared a working document, version 0.5, which is duplicated below:

One thing that LF Energy wants to develop is a project vocabulary (§5.3.1), also described as a “canonical glossary”. Clearly there will be overlap with similar efforts within this community and hopefully we can coordinate. The edge computing glossary is considered a good example.

One issue that would be useful to pursue is that the electricity sector will soon be collecting and databasing huge amounts of data. I suggested consideration be given to making some of this available for public interest analysis after it has become commercially stale, perhaps after 12 months.

Finally, there are mailing lists for each of the tracks discussed above. More here for the data architecture track:

References

Biddle, C Bradford (27 May 2020). “Linux Foundation is eating the world”. Journal of Open Law, Technology and Society. 11 (1). ISSN 2666-8106. doi:105033/jolts.v11i1.137.

LF Energy (7 July 2020). LF Energy data architecture working document — version 0.5. LF Energy. (See above for link.)

Ward, David (13 November 2014). Open standards, open source, open loop. Cisco Blogs.