Introduction
The Coalition for Smart Buildings (C4SB) has operated for four years, with many of its founders present today. Today, we are pleased to announce that C4SB officially joins the Linux Foundation. While we’ve collaborated closely with the Linux Foundation since AHR, this formalization marks a significant milestone in our mission to drive open, community-driven innovation in smart buildings and the Internet of Things (IoT).
Our goal is simple: Enable transparency, collaboration, and trust in how work is done—the Linux way.
Why Process Transparency Matters
The Linux Foundation has long been a beacon of open-source development, standardization, and community-driven progress. By adopting its principles, we ensure:
✅ Open Governance – Decisions are made transparently, with input from all stakeholders.
✅ Reproducibility – Work is documented in public GitHub repositories, ensuring anyone can audit, contribute to, or fork projects.
✅ Community-Driven Standards – No single vendor dominates; solutions are built for the industry, by the industry.
GitHub: The Backbone of Open Collaboration
All C4SB projects will be hosted on public GitHub repositories to ensure complete transparency. This means:
- Code, documentation, and standards are freely accessible.
- Pull requests, issues, and discussions are open for community participation.
- Version control and CI/CD pipelines ensure traceability and reliability.
Example: The Tiger Team’s Semantic Metadata Model
One of our first major initiatives was the Tiger Team, which focused on semantic metadata model normalization (or standardization, as we prefer to call it).
- Problem: Different ontologies (Brick, RealEstateCore, ASHRAE 223P, Haystack, IFC) were being used in silos, leading to interoperability challenges.
- Solution: The team worked to align these models, ensuring they can work together seamlessly.
- Outcome: A unified knowledge graph that allows cross-domain queries (e.g., “Which spaces are affected if this HVAC unit fails?”).
👉 Check out the C4SB Tiger Team’s GitHub repo for code, demos, and documentation.
The Linux Foundation: A Home for Industry-Wide Collaboration
The Linux Foundation is increasingly seen as the place where:
- Owners, developers, and vendors come together to solve industry-wide challenges.
- Open standards are developed without vendor lock-in.
- Fast, agile working groups (like our Tiger Team) can convene to solve problems quickly.
What’s Next?
With C4SB now under the Linux Foundation, we’re looking to expand our working groups to tackle:
- Demos & Tutorials – Showcasing how semantic models work in real-world applications.
- Education & Outreach – Helping the industry understand and adopt these standards.
- Interoperability with IFC & BACnet – Bridging BIM and operational data.
- Cybersecurity Standards – Ensuring secure, zero-trust architectures (aligned with BACnet/SC).
- IDB (Interoperability Data Bridge) – A cloud-native gateway for smart buildings.
How You Can Get Involved
This is not a pay-to-play initiative. Participation is open to:
- Building owners – Define the problems you need solved.
- System integrators – Help implement these standards in the field.
- OEMs & vendors – Contribute to open-source tooling.
- Developers & data scientists – Build the next generation of smart building apps.
👉 Join us on GitHub, attend working group meetings, and help shape the future of smart buildings.
Conclusion
By embracing open-source principles, GitHub transparency, and Linux Foundation governance, we’re ensuring that smart buildings evolve collaboratively, vendor-neutrally, and scalablely.
Let’s build the future—the Linux way.
🔗 Visit Linux GitHub | Join our working groups
*”The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is now.”*
— Let’s start collecting and structuring building data today.
Watch this week’s Monday Live! A recording of Monday’s C4SB/Linux Foundation session at Realcomm/IBcon presenting an update on the Semantic Tiger Team and other projects within C4SB.
https://lnkd.in/e8AP9Nyh Anno Scholten Anto Budiardjo David Wilts James Lee Keith Gipson Ken Sinclair Marc Petock Rick Justis Roger Woodward Steve Fey Tracy Markie C4SB – Coalition for Smarter Buildings The IBB Project
