Workplace-Glossar

Building information modeling (BIM) is a process supported by various tools, technologies and contracts involving the generation and management of digital representations of physical and functional characteristics of places.

A Building Management System (BMS) is a computer-based control system installed in buildings that controls and monitors the building's mechanical and electrical equipment.

The Workplace Brain enables you to define conditions (for example "IF temperature is higher than 25°C") and actions (for example: "Send an e-mail to John Doe") which you can link together. If a condition is met, an action is triggered. All the different possible rules that the Workplace team can set up for your tenant are listed in the Brain rules repository

A capacitor stores electric charge, but in a different way than a battery. It is used to smooth out interruptions from the battery to the sensor. When replacing a battery (or even placing the same battery again), wait for at least 3h between removal and replacement of the battery to make sure that there is no left-over "power" inside the capacitor.

A cloud software service that manages the CogniPoint™ (Pointgrab) sensors, receives their analytics data, and makes it available to the Spacewell Workplace Platform via API.

More information on the Pointgrab platform configuration: /wiki/spaces/KB/pages/492295

• Crowdedness Indicator is a label explaining how crowded a floor is based on number of reserved and/or occupied locations

• The least occupied floor is the floor with the lowest crowdedness indicator (Levels see below)

Crowdedness Indicator Calculation

Crowdedness Indicator is calculated for per Location Type (rooms, desks, parking spaces; in Workplace App floor cards) or combination of all (Workplace App header; Kiosk in Kiosk mode).

Depending on the set-up of the Workplace environment, the calculations can be based on reservation data only, occupancy data only, or a combination of both:

Calculation per Location Type

• Based on reservations only: Total number of reserved location type (rooms, desks, or parking spaces) / Total number of location type x 100

• Based on live sensor data:  Total number of occupied location type (rooms, desks, or parking spaces) / Total number of location type x 100

• Based on both: Total number of occupied location type + total number of reserved location type / Total number of location type x 100

Calculation including All Location Types

• Based on reservations only: Total number of reserved locations (desks + rooms + parking spaces) / Total number of locations x 100

• Based on live sensor data:  Total number of occupied locations (desks + rooms + parking spaces) / Total number of locations x 100

• Based on both: Total number of occupied locations + total number of reserved locations / Total locations x 100
  In case of combination of both occupied and reserved locations, we make sure to exclude doubles.

Possible Crowdedness Indicator Levels

• Almost empty (0-20%)

• Quiet (20-40%)

• Not crowded (40-60%)

• Lively (60-80%)

• Crowded (80-99.9%)

• Full (100%)

Crowdedness Indicator Calculation Examples

Remember that numbers on floor card are displayed using format: (unoccupied + not reserved)/total

2nd floor

In the above example, we see that

• there is a total of 208 locations (37 meeting rooms + 171 workplaces) on the 2nd floor

• no occupancy is detected in 23 meeting rooms and on 107 workplaces (130 in total)

This means that occupancy and/or reservations are detected in 78 locations (14 rooms + 64 workplaces).

Divide 78 (currently occupied or reserved locations) by 208 (total locations available), and you’ll see that overall occupancy is 37.5%, hence Crowdedness indicator label “Quiet” is used.

3rd floor

In the above example, we see that

• there is a total of 108 locations (47 meeting rooms + 61 workplaces) on the 3rd floor

• no occupancy is detected in 27 meeting rooms and on 4 workplaces (31 in total)

This means that occupancy and/or reservations are detected in 77 locations (20 rooms + 57 workplaces).

Divide 77 (currently occupied or reserved locations) by 108 (total locations available), and you’ll see that overall occupancy is 71.3%, hence Crowdedness indicator label “Lively” is used.

A data warehouse is a repository that stores current and historical data. The data coming from the sensors goes through different processes to match the data already in the warehouse (eg get a date/time stamp, tenant identifier). The data from the warehouse can be visualized trough the Workplace back-end Studio Sensor Data Management or front-end Go Dashboard, or exported using the GO Export feature.

More information on Workplace front-end GO: Workplace web (Go)

See glossary definition of Workplace (desk) below

A Detection area of a sensor is the area in which the sensor can detect presence. The detection area is determined by the sensor’s placement, height and direction. The notion of a detection area is important when installing and configuring Tabs Motion and Headcount sensors (Pointgrab, Vergesense).

More information on Workplace sensors for which you need to define a detection area: Motion sensor installation (see Closed Rooms), Pointgrab, VergeSense

A footfall sensor is a people counter counting people who pass by the sensors, analyzing whether people are coming or going. The way to configure this is by setting up Traffic lines (see below for definition of Traffic line).

More information on Workplace footfall sensor Pointgrab: Pointgrab

A Headcount sensor is a ceiling mounted device that uses computer vision algorithms to generate data and analytics.

More information on Workplace headcount sensors: Pointgrab, VergeSense

Intune is a mobile device management tool by Microsoft. The Workplace App is available for iOS for intune.

LoRa, short for LoRaWAN (Long Range Wide Area Network) is a network technique where sensor devices connect to gateways/hubs through radio frequency bands. LoRa enables long-range transmissions with low power consumption outside of the customer WiFi network.

More information on which hubs and LoRa devices are on offer in the Spacewell Workplace hardware catalogue and how to install them: LoRa Gateways / Hubs installation guides

Spacewell’s Meeting Room Displays (MRD) can be compared to tablets, taking into account that they are designed to broadcast day and night.

The best way of using Meeting Room Displays is to install the Kiosk App. Depending on configuration, Kiosk App can allow end-users to

• get more details on the meeting room (name of the room, picture, capacity, live sensor data),

• find reservation information for this and other meeting rooms, and immediately make a reservation,

• look at the location of this meeting room on the floor plan,

• find their way to custom content (which can be presented as an image, a video or a document (PDF),

• …

More information on Meeting Room Displays and how they can be steered: Room Display , Device Control for Kiosk App

Provisioning of hardware (gateways/hubs and applications/sensors) on the relevant platform and then also within the respective tenant in Workplace back-end Studio means uploading and configuring them correctly, so that data is send from the sensor through the platform to the Workplace touch points.

• Platform provisioning is usually done by the hardware manager

• Studio tenant provisioning is usually done by the Spacewell Implementation Consultant (or, after training, can also be done by any autonomous user with admin rights)

More information on Adding New Device in Spacewell back-end Studio: Sensor Management

Depending on the type of sensor, data can be send in regular or irregular time intervals to the Workplace platform:

• a sensor might send data in regular intervals, for example Pointgrab sends data every (1) minute to the Workplace platform

• a sensor might send data in irregular intervals, for example some Building Management Systems might only send data upon value change. The next value change might occur fairly quickly, or might only occur after a couple of days. Since Workplace aggregates and stores the data per 15 minutes: without any further action, many time slots might be empty, which can cause issues when looking at the dashboards.

For example both Presence detection and also Comfort data can be send in irregular intervals (for example upon value change)

This can be solved by copying data in time slots (see https://spacewell.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/KB/pages/5242896/External+Data+Sources#FAQ)

Typically this topic is relevant for presence events, more specifically we look towards PIR sensors as being unreliable in communicating all values.

• some sensors are reliable

  • for example headcount sensors like Pointgrab or VergeSense send data with each value change. Also if that value is 0.

• some sensors are unreliable

  • for example PIR sensors send data when they are triggered for presence. This means they are fairly reliable when it comes to reporting on presence detection, but because of how they work and then send data, we can only assume that if they have not reported about having detected presence in the last 15 minutes, this also means that the space is vacant. Yet we are missing the vacancy confirmation from the sensor.

"Meeting Room Seat" designates the seats/chair in a meeting room that can be used for measuring (indirect) utilization: If a motion sensor is attached to the ceiling of the meeting room and then per Meeting Room Seat 1 motion sensor is placed to track occupancy of each "Meeting Room Seat", indirect utilization can be measured.

More information, possibilities and attention points of (indirect) utilization: Utilization & Occupancy Matrix

Sumorea was the initial name of the Workplace Platform. This fairly quickly changed to “Cobundu”. Since 2022, the Spacewell product Cobundu is presented as "Workplace".

Since a complete migration (from “Sumorea” to “Workplace”) was quite complicated, it was decided to keep the 2 domain aliases, http://sumorea.com (under the hood) and http://cobundu.com (as primary client-facing).

A tenant is a group of users who share a common access with specific privileges to the Workplace platform. In Workplace, we usually have 1 tenant per customer (since there is only 1 production environment available). This distinction is prominent in the UID.

More information on how to create users in your tenant: Users & Groups

/wiki/spaces/KB/pages/492072 is the WEB management interface for the LoRa sensors and their hubs that are available on The Things Stack Cloud.

Hubs send sensor data to TTN before it is available in the Workplace Platform.

Traffic line areas are intended to track traffic going in and coming out of a specific location. They can be set up using a footfall sensor.

More information on Workplace footfall sensor Pointgrab: Pointgrab

Occupancy (eg 50% occupied in 8h time) vs utilization (2 out of 4 chairs)

e.g. a room can be occupied 50% of a day (4 out of 8h) but when only 2 chairs are used out of 4,

 it is utilized 50% against 50% occupation.

-> The real performance is then only 25% (half a day used for half the capacity).

Other example: An 8h meeting for 2 people in a meeting room with capacity 10

• Occupancy = 100%

• Utilization = 20%

More information: Utilization & Occupancy Matrix

The view direction of the sensor in relation to the floor of the room it is in. Determines the orientation of its detection area. This is especially important for headcount sensors.

More information on Workplace headcount sensors: Pointgrab, VergeSense

A Workplace is a desk in an open landscape office (eg not the same as an individual office, nor a seat in a meeting room). When it comes to installing a motion sensor at a Workplace, a workplace is defined as

• Width of workplace: between 120-180 cm

• Table should be between 60-80 cm high (can also be height adjustable to standing table)

• Depth of the table should be minimum 65 cm

A Workplace is a kind of location that can be differentiated compared to Meeting Rooms and Parking Spaces in Workplace touchpoints.

More information on Workplace touchpoints: Workplace web (Go) (see GO > Controls > Spacetype), The Workplace App, Kiosk

A Workplace is the smallest type of location possible in Workplace (following the location tree structure area > building > floor > room > desk/workplace). It can be used to represent

• a desk in an open landscape office, where sensor values (eg comfort, occupancy, ...) need to be shown

• a meeting room seat when setting up indirect utilization (see glossary definition of “Seat” above)

When setting up Workplace, its needed that every property uses the following space structure:

• Property (this is the top level)

  • Floor

    • Area (meetingroom, office, concentration space, etc...)

      • Workspaces

Workplace App is the end-user app of the Spacewell Workplace product. It can be used to view live data for a location, make a reservation, search a colleague based on the reservation on this users' name, etc

Spacewell Smart Building platform (https://spacewell.com/solutions/workplace-solutions/), is divided in 2 product lines: Monitor and Assist:

• Monitor: Installing sensors or using data to monitor what is going on inside the building

• Assist (Usually building upon the Monitor-information): Using touchpoints as Workplace App and Kiosk App to assist end-users in finding their way around the building and interact, eg by making reservations.

More information on Workplace touchpoints: Workplace web (Go), The Workplace App, Kiosk