Design Principles

Brick is an ontology-based metadata schema that captures the entities and relationships necessary for effective representations of buildings and their subsystems. Brick describes buildings in a machine readable format to enable programmatic exploration of different operational, structural and functional facets of a building.

Design Principles

Brick adheres to the following design principles:

• Completeness: A schema should represent all the information (such as a sensor’s location, type, etc.) required by building applications.

• Expressivity: A schema should capture the diverse family of entities and relationships between them that are present in a building’s BMS and expressed in canonical energy-, operations- and management-oriented applications and scenarios.

• Usability: A schema should be not too complex for users to easily understand and use.

• Consistency: A schema should be able to enforce consistency in modeling processes across different users.

• Extensibility: A schema should be easily extensible to cover new concepts in a consistent way.