In the US, back-to-school season is that magical time when students everywhere churn out essays about their “life-changing” beach trips or the noble purpose behind the 887 hours they logged on video games. At ACE IoT Solutions, our summer leaned less toward coding camps and travel soccer tournaments and more toward customer conversations and a healthy dose of organizational soul-searching. The payoff? We’re heading into fall sharper, fresher, and gearing up to unveil a revamped website in the coming weeks. Think of this post as our own version of the classic “What I Did This Summer” essay—just with fewer sunburns and only the occasional gelato.
Semantic interoperability is one of those phrases that sounds more technical than it is, but if you strip away the jargon, it simply means this: systems that can communicate and actually understand each other. It’s the difference between having a room full of people shouting in different languages, and having a conversation where everyone speaks and listens fluently.
In buildings, semantic interoperability means that devices, systems, and software can share data that’s structured in a consistent way. Not just the numbers, but the meaning behind those numbers: what they represent, where they came from, how they relate to other systems, and how they should be used.
Ocean Discovery Institute (ODI) is a nonprofit organization in San Diego’s City Heights neighborhood that uses science to transform lives. Their LEED Platinum-certified Living Lab provides thousands of young people—many of them historically excluded from science—with the tools, mentorship, and hands-on experience needed to become tomorrow’s science and sustainability leaders.
Stok, a long-time leader in sustainable real estate services, partnered with ACE IoT to deploy an Independent Data Layer (IDL) at the Living Lab—ensuring the ODI team has access to building performance data that supports both daily operations and long-term impact.
Read on for a closer look inside the Living Lab—and how data is helping bring its mission to life.