Brick

TLDR

Commercial buildings are increasingly targeted by cyber‑physical, energy, and human‑interaction applications, yet widespread adoption is hindered by the absence of a common descriptive schema that captures the necessary relationships and entities. This paper introduces Brick, a uniform schema for representing building metadata. Brick defines a concrete ontology of sensors, subsystems, and their relationships, enabling portable applications. Brick was shown complete and effective by representing 17,700 vendor‑specific sensor data points from six buildings and running eight complex unmodified applications on them.

Abstract

Commercial buildings have long since been a primary target for applications from a number of areas: from cyber-physical systems to building energy use to improved human interactions in built environments. While technological advances have been made in these areas, such solutions rarely experience widespread adoption due to the lack of a common descriptive schema which would reduce the now-prohibitive cost of porting these applications and systems to different buildings. Recent attempts have sought to address this issue through data standards and metadata schemes, but fail to capture the set of relationships and entities required by real applications. Building upon these works, this paper describes Brick, a uniform schema for representing metadata in buildings. Our schema defines a concrete ontology for sensors, subsystems and relationships among them, which enables portable applications. We demonstrate the completeness and effectiveness of Brick by using it to represent the entire vendor-specific sensor metadata of six diverse buildings across different campuses, comprising 17,700 data points, and running eight complex unmodified applications on these buildings.