The smarter a building is, the more data it produces, so as smart buildings mature they face an ever-increasing data management problem. The more data a building produces, the more accurate and insightful its smart systems can be, but only if the data can be harnessed, otherwise that growing “data lake” becomes a costly burden. The widely accepted solution to this problem are data ontologies that utilize semantic tagging to categorize and structure the data, allowing buildings to use it more effectively. Several ontologies have emerged to address this need but this has created a new form of fragmentation in the buildings market and a new form of confusion for building owners and managers.

“There are several schemas and ontologies used in the industry today, with no true consensus or front runner, it feels too often that this decision–what ontology to use– must be made before everything else. This slows down the process of creating smart buildings as time and effort is spent on picking the data model to apply. Often owners can become paralyzed by these decisions, which prevents them from moving forward at all,” a Buildings IoT official told Fierce Electronics. “We hope that in the future if you choose to model your building in one standard, whether it be Brick, Haystack, RealEstateCore, etc., you can easily convert that model to any of the other standards.”

2022 has proved a turning point for this industry-wide issue as numerous announcements indicate a convergence of the key smart building ontologies. At The Digital Twin Consortium in February this year, Project Haystack, Brick Schema, and Google’s Digital Buildings announced a liaison agreement, marking their intention to collaborate on standardization and interoperability requirements. Then, just this week, Brick Schema and RealEstateCore (REC) announced a major harmonization effort, resulting in a new, clarified metadata solution, and removing the need to choose between these two leading industry standards.

“When all of the work is completed, the two standards will be complementary and redesigned to work together. Rather than modeling a building using only Brick or using only REC, in the new solution, buildings will be modeled using the best parts of Brick and the best parts of REC,” reads the official announcement. “For example, in the semantic model for a building, a piece of HVAC equipment and its sensors would be modeled using Brick, while the equipment’s location, the building’s lease, and other key real estate concerns would be modeled using REC. This scenario is made possible because both Brick and REC have leveraged a shared semantic web foundation to enable the interoperability and collaborative use of their ontologies in a given building’s model.”

Launched in 2016 as a collaboration between IBM Research, Carnegie Mellon University, UC Berkeley, the University of Southern Denmark, and others, Brick Schema defines a concrete ontology for sensors, subsystems, and the relationships among them using technologies developed for the semantic web. “Brick excels in defining classes and relationships for HVAC and electrical systems and is expanding to incorporate domains such as security and access control, fire protection, location tracking, and AV equipment,” explains our in-depth report on all aspects of the IoT in smart buildings.

REC, meanwhile, is a modular ontology developed from the property owner’s perspective. It provides a common language designed to enable control over buildings and the development of new services. It maps sensor data (both real-time and historical) in a standardized format, with all data connected to the full building device and lease graph to provide complete context metadata for analysis and the development of new applications. REC employs RDF-based knowledge graphs that have been developed through best practices and the experience of larger Scandinavian property owners such as Vasakronan.

“The Brick Schema and RealEstateCore combine the best of two worlds. We have created a complete open-source standard based on semantic web technologies which the industry can use efficiently for a long time,” reads a joint-statement by Gabriel Fierro of the Brick Consortium and Erik Wallin of the RealEstateCore Consortium. “We enable buildings to become good inhabitants of smart cities and contribute to reducing carbon emissions.”

A working group of representatives from both standards has been meeting over the past six months to identify areas of overlap between the two standards and determine which parts to keep in each standard. The expectation, however, is that equipment and sensors will be managed by the Brick ontology, while spatial information and facility usage types will be managed by REC’s ontology, along with core information modelling for commercial real estate management. The harmonization of the two standards is also being developed with the intention for compatibility with the long-awaited ASHRAE 223 standard.

“Everything clicks into place when Brick Schema and REC work in concert. Brick provides the detailed technical descriptions of systems within the buildings, while REC adds language for facility maintenance, certification, and financial aspects etc,” says REC’s Erik Wallin, who is also Chief Ecosystem Officer at ProptechOS. “Valuable data flows more freely, formerly complicated system integrations become easier and more reliable, and building managers gain a consistent overview of building operations. Plus, of course, this means that smart building benefits become far more accessible —both now and in the future, as the possibilities continue to grow."

The cross-compatible Brick Schema 1.3 and RealEstateCore 4.0 are both targeting a release on August 30, 2022. These releases will include much of the technological foundation necessary to make the harmonization possible while letting each standard preserve backwards compatibility with the previous versions of their respective standards. Full harmonization will occur in future releases of the two standards, which is expected to occur quickly after the August release date. The two standards will continue to exist as standalone projects, each managed by their respective consortiums, but their cross-compatibility marks a turning point for a fragmented smart buildings market seeking harmonization of data management solutions.