Newbie question: how to create multiple buildings in semantic model

1

I have just installed openHAB 5 on my raspberry pi 3. And the first thing I trip upon is setting up the semantic model.
How does someone create a model with multiple buildings? For example, a standalone garage, or an ADU, or a standalone shop?
I can create a new location and call it garage, but how to I attach the tag “building” to this new location?
I am sure I am missing something obvious, but I did some searching before I decided to post this question here.

Thanks,

Rick

2

You don’t need to tag it (or anything, actually) a building. There’s no functionality associated with doing that AFAIK.
Note you won’t be commanding your home via the UI layout of the semantic model.
It’s really just there to help you semantically group rooms and devices so you can use that in functions like speech assistants.

3

Keep an eye on that. An RPi 3 is likely going to not have enough RAM to run openHAB 5 well.If you start to have problems, that’s likely to be the first likely cause.

Like @mstormi said, there really isn’t one single approach and use of the semantic model is purely optional.

But I can say how I do it. I have two locations, my home and my dad’s home. So I created one house location for my dad’s house and put all the Items at that location under it and another house location for my home.

My home has some inside stuff and some outside stuff and three floors. So I modeled the outside same as one of the floors.

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But this is just one way to do it and it’s what works for me. You need to figure out what works best for you or whether you even need the semantic model at all.

The model controls how the cards on the Locations, Equipment, and Properties are organized. This is the most common reason to use the model and therefore you’ll set up your model based on how you want to have the cards on these pages organized. In my case, it keeps my dads house separate from my house.

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It can be used in rules (e.g. I trigger a rule using one Item that’s a member of the Equipment and then use the semantic model to get the “status” Item on that same Equipment).

const equipment = items[alertItem].semantics.equipment;
const statusItem = equipment.members.find(i => i.tags.includes('Status'));
const refid = statusItem+'_offline_alert';

if(isAlerting && statusItem.state != 'OFF') {
  statusItem.postUpdate('OFF');
  console.info(equipment.label + ' is offline!')
  actions.notificationBuilder(equipment.label + ' has stopped reporting!')
         .addUserId('rlkoshak@gmail.com')
         .withTag('Alarm')
         .withTitle(equipment.label + 'Stopped!')
         .withIcon('if:wpf:online')
         .withReferenceId(refid)                              
         .send();
}
else if(!isAlerting && statusItem.state != 'ON') {
  statusItem.postUpdate('ON');
  console.info(equipment.label + ' is back online');
  actions.notificationBuilder("hide notification").withReferenceId(refid).hide().send();
}
else {
  console.info('Sensor status update alerting ' + isAlerting + ' initial ' + isInitialAlert + ' equipment ' + equipment.label + ' status ' + statusItem.state);
}

It’s used by HABot and possibly by the chatbot binding.

But that’s it, that’s all the the semantic model is used for. And it’s there for you and the users of your home’s benefit. So the correct arrangement is the one that works best for you. As long as you follow the rules of the semantic model (e.g. no one Point or Equipment can be in more than one location) anything is possible and valid.