Brick Consortium seeks smart building data interoperability
January 21, 2022
By CCE
The next version of the Brick schema is due next month.
Logo courtesy Johnson Controls.
Five companies—Carrier, Clockworks Analytics, Johnson Controls, Mapped and Schneider Electric—have joined forces as the inaugural commercial members of the Brick Consortium, which seeks to help make data interoperable for smart buildings.
The non-profit consortium will work with academic partners to sponsor and encourage research and development (R&D), for the purpose of extending the open-source Brick schema’s specifications for the built environment and ensuring their compatibility with other standards. The next version of the schema (1.3) is expected to be released next month (i.e. February 2022).
The schema provides a common mapping and interchange format for data from heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC), building automation, lighting, electrical, access control, fire protection and occupancy detection systems, among others. The consortium is developing tooling, conformance testing protocols and a repository of reference models and use cases.
“The consortium will provide assurances that Brick has a long-term future and can be a contributing technology for improving the efficiency and comfort of buildings,” says Carnegie Mellon University professor Mario Bergés, a member of the consortium’s steering committee.
By way of example, Brick now supports Carrier’s Abound digital platform, Johnson Controls’ OpenBlue digital twin products and Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure for Buildings platform. Mapped recognizes the schema as “the best repository for collecting and organizing the common metadata schema for building applications,” according to chief data scientist Jason Koh, while Clockworks Analytics CEO Nick Gayeski says joining the consortium “underscores our commitment to help the industry turn operational data into real-time insight for healthier buildings in a scalable way.”
Version 1.3 of the Brick schema will integrate with real-time data sources like BACnet, offer a more expressive model for chillers and heat pumps and support ease of interoperability with future standards, such as ASHRAE 223P, ‘Designation and Classification of Semantic Tags for Building Data,’ currently under development.
