Brick v1.4.0 Release Candidate 1 Released

[ga...@brickschema.org]

Hi everyone:

I've finished the build for Brick 1.4.0-rc1, our release candidate before the official Brick 1.4 release. Please see the download, release notes and changes here: https://github.com/BrickSchema/Brick/releases/tag/v1.4.0-rc1 . While I work on updating the documentation on https://brickschema.org/ontology, please feel free to browse the standard here: https://ontology.brickschema.org 

Among other changes, this release contains support for the Brick/RealEstateCore (REC) harmonization effort, meaning these two ontologies can (and should!) be used together. The Brick.ttl file contains all necessary definitions of REC, included by default.

Please take a look at the release candidate and let us know what you think! Are there bugs? Omissions? Problems loading it into your software? Please feel free to respond here in this thread, start new threads, or open issues on GitHub. This slide deck contains some of what we presented at the recent Brick/REC 2024 conference ; it details some of the Brick 1.4 changes and shows how we achieved harmonization with REC 4.0. We hope to receive and address all these comments by the end of February, at which point we will be able to release the official Brick 1.4 version.

Thanks to all of you for your continued help and support on Brick. I'm excited about the 1.4-rc1 release, and I'm looking forward to what's to come.

Best,

Gabe

[Benedict Pego]

Hi Gabe,

Thanks for sharing this; it's looking good! One question: are you planning on adding 'definitions' to the space classes, as exist in v1.3 and before? I find a lot of the 1.4/REC space classes quite confusing and I can't find good explanations of what each room type is supposed to be in REC, while the Brick definitions normally made this really clear.

For example, take the EnclosedSpace class from v1.3:
Enclosed Office - BrickSchema
The definition of this space as "A space for individuals to work with walls and a door" was really helpful when deciding whether this was the correct class to use for a given space. Meanwhile, in v1.4 we have "OfficeLandscape" and "OfficeRoom", and I'm not really sure what either of these are! I've tried looking for definitions from REC themselves as well as in DTDL and failed.

Yours,
Benedict.

[ga...@brickschema.org]

Hi Benedict:

We are in the process of adding the missing Brick classes to REC as part of this release. Please take a look at the pending PR here (https://github.com/RealEstateCore/rec/pull/260) and let us know if you need any other locations added! It does seem like the REC classes don't have definitions attached to them; we can certainly add those definitions to their representations in the Brick distribution but I agree it would be great to see the definitions on the REC side as well.

Best,

Gabe