What to do with Brick Ontologies

[Philip H.]

Hello Brick Community

Thank you very much so far for helping me with all my issues. I was finally able to transform some of my data into a Brick ontology.

However now I wonder how the ontology can be used. I know some tools like Protège or different viewer tools like Brickviewer or Brickstudio. These are good to take a first look at the data, but don't help much in making the information more accessible for humans.

What I'd need is some kind of mapping, for example in a CAD tool or some kind of HVAC or building blueprint, where the data is visualized and interactive. Is there something like this for Brick available or planned?

 

Best Regards

Philip

[Nicholas Car]

If you use GeoSPARQL for spatial things in your BRICK data, you could use any number of tools for spatial display, like QGIS. You could even convert the geometries to IFC data for 3D display.

Generically, any triplestore, like Jena, GraphDB, RDF4J etc. will let you SPARQL query your BRICK data in ontology form, perform inferencing on it etc. many of those triple stores have visualisation and integration options with other tool.

So, you can do plenty with BRICK data! With your data in RDF, it’s about as well defined and interoperable as any data could ever be!

Nick

— 

Dr Nicholas Car

Data Systems Architect

SURROUND Australia

0477 560 177

nichol...@surroundaustralia.com

On 9 Nov 2021, at 5:39 pm, Philip H. <svenrpg...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Philip H.]

Thank you very much for the pointers.

They will help me a lot with my further research.

So far, my own research only provided meager results:

I was able to find HodDB, whose description leads me to believe it could at least help with querying. The project seems inactive however, since the documentation is empty. I would be very interested in HodDB.

For building analytics, that would help understand the data could Mortar help as well? I often see that time-series data is needed as well, how do I get it? Probably not from a single Excel, instead multiple over a period of time?

I also found that there is a IFC format you mentioned. However it seems conversion goes from IFC-> Brick not the other way around. I'm hopeful that it might help, since you mentioned it might be used for 3D display in some way. This would be very desirable for me.

Best
Philip

[Philip H.]

Another Question I'd like to add :

I don't think there is any geometrical or spacial information in my data set. The closest would be feeds or isfedby relationships that indicate a sequential order.

Is there possibly any geometric information appended to the Classes Brick uses to map data or do I need to create this data as best as possible myself?

[Gabe Fierro]

Hi Philip:

I would echo Nick's great recommendations on triplestores for querying Brick models. Mortar (https://github.com/gtfierro/mortar) is a little heavyweight if you are just getting into using Brick w/ timeseries data, so I would recommend checking out this repo and associated tutorial video (https://github.com/gtfierro/brick-data-retrieval-demo) for an example of how to use Brick models to find timeseries data. You can also use the code here (https://github.com/gtfierro/mortar-parquet-support/tree/main/mortar-parquet-client) to access some timeseries data using Brick models; the set up there is even simpler because it is just reading from Parquet files. The advantage of the Mortar platform is that it supports live uploading of data through the API, though that would also be supported in the brick-data-retrieval-demo repository as well (you'd insert directly into the SQL or timeseries database). Any of these platforms would be appropriate for conducting analytics; I think the brick-data-retrieval-demo is the cleanest expression of how to fetch data using a Brick model and I would recommend starting there.

You would need to add your own geometric/spatial information to Brick beyond what is captured by the logical relationships already there. We are discussing how to support localization and references to geometry in Brick (so that we can use, for example, the geometric definitions provided by other standards and models) but this is not ready yet.

Feel free to reach out if you'd like to go over this together in more detail. My email can be found on my website: https://home.gtf.fyi/

Best,

Gabe

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