External Representation

Note

This feature is new in Brick v1.3

Instances of Point in Brick are representations of I/O points and data sources and sinks. Brick supports relating Points to their representations in external systems, e.g. BACnet networks and timeseries databases. This allows software to use a Brick model to configure its access to those other systems. These references are encoded using the ref-schema schema; a copy of the schema is packaged with the Brick ontology.

The generic relationship ref:hasExternalReference can be used to find these other references. A Brick Point can have any number of external references.

Brick currently supports the following external representations:

• ref:TimeseriesReference: links a Brick Point to its data in a timeseries database

• ref:BACnetReference: links a Brick Point to its corresponding BACnet object

Examples follow below.

BACnet

The BACnet reference object is linked to a Brick Point with the ref:hasExternalReference relationship pointing to a ref:BACnetReference object. There are two possible forms of the BACnet reference object:

Option 1 supports the following fields:

• bacnet:object-identifier: the BACnet object ID: object-type,object-instance-number

• bacnet:object-name: the name field: the description field for the BACnet object

• bacnet:object-type: the BACnet type of the object, e.g. analog-input

• bacnet:description: the description field for the BACnet object

• bacnet:read-property: which property to read for the value; defaults to present-value

Option 2 supports the BACnet URI scheme:

• brick:BACnetURI: defined in clause Q.8 of the BACnet spec: bacnet:// <device> / <object> [ / <property> [ / <index> ]]

@prefix bldg: <urn:example#> .
@prefix ref: <https://brickschema.org/schema/Brick/ref#> .
@prefix brick: <https://brickschema.org/schema/Brick#> .
@prefix bacnet: <http://data.ashrae.org/bacnet/2020#> .
@prefix unit: <http://qudt.org/vocab/unit/> .
@prefix xsd: <http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#> .

bldg:sample-device a bacnet:BACnetDevice ;
    bacnet:device-instance 123 ;
    bacnet:hasPort [ a bacnet:Port ] .

# Option 1: explicit fields
bldg:ts1 a brick:Zone_Air_Temperature_Sensor ;
    brick:hasUnit unit:DEG_C ;
    ref:hasExternalReference [
        a ref:BACnetReference ;
        bacnet:object-identifier "analog-value,5" ;
        bacnet:object-name "BLDG-Z410-ZATS" ;
        bacnet:objectOf bldg:sample-device ;
    ] .

# Option 2: BACnet URI
bldg:ts2 a brick:Zone_Air_Temperature_Sensor ;
    brick:hasUnit unit:DEG_C ;
    ref:hasExternalReference [
        a ref:BACnetReference ;
		brick:BACnetURI "bacnet://123/analog-input,3/present-value" ;
        bacnet:objectOf bldg:sample-device ;
    ] .

Timeseries

See the metadata/timeseries-storage section.

Discovering External Representations

The ref:hasExternalReference relationships can be used to find external representations. Those external references should be annotated with what kind of external reference they are.

Consider the following example:

# example.ttl
bldg:ts1 a brick:Zone_Air_Temperature_Sensor ;
    brick:hasUnit unit:DEG_C ;
    ref:hasExternalReference [
        a ref:BACnetReference ;
        bacnet:object-identifier "analog-value,5" ;
        bacnet:object-name "BLDG-Z410-ZATS" ;
        bacnet:objectOf bldg:sample-device ;
    ] ;
    ref:hasExternalReference [
        a ref:TimeseriesReference ;
        ref:hasTimeseriesId "756e1623-914f-4415-9000-b1b10ce8f5c9" ;
        ref:storedAt "postgres://1.2.3.4:5432/mydata" ;
    ] .

In Python, using the brickschema package, external representations can be found and typed as follows:

import brickschema

g = brickschema.Graph()
g.load_file("Brick.ttl")
g.load_file("example.ttl")

g.expand("shacl")

query = """SELECT ?point ?rep ?type WHERE {
    ?point ref:hasExternalReference ?rep .
    ?rep   a ?type .
}