Metafier — A tool for annotating and structuring building metadata

Buildings often have several systems installed (i.e. different forms of Building Management Systems (BMS)), with the combined goal of providing a good comfort level for the occupants of the building. With such a goal, it would be natural for such systems to share information and collaborate in achieving this goal, but often they work as silos. Improving at scale the energy performance of buildings depends on applications breaking these silos and being portable among buildings. To enable portable building applications, the building instrumentation should be supported by a metadata layer, describing the instrumentation of the building. We have created Metafier, a tool for annotating and structuring metadata for buildings. Metafier optimizes the workflow of establishing metadata for buildings by enabling a human-in-the-loop to validate, search and group points. We have evaluated Metafier for two buildings, with different sizes, locations, ages and purposes. The evaluation was performed as a user test with three subjects with different backgrounds. The evaluation results indicates that the tool enabled the users to validate, search and group points while annotating metadata. One challenge is to get users to understand the concept of metadata for the tool to be useable. Based on our evaluation, we have listed guidelines for creating a tool for annotating building metadata.