The Digital Buildings project is an open-source, Apache-licensed effort to create a uniform schema and toolset for representing structured information about buildings and building-installed equipment. A version of the Digital Buildings ontology and toolset is currently being used by Google to manage buildings in its portfolio.
The Digital Buildings project originated from the need to manage a very large, heterogeneous building portfolio in a scalable way. The project aims to enable management applications/analyses that are trivially portable between buildings. This goal is achieved through a combination of semantically-expressive abstract modeling, an easy-to-use configuration language, and robust validation tooling. Digital Buildings work has been inspired by Project Haystack and BrickSchema, and maintains cross-compatibility and/or convergence as a long-term objective.
In creating the Digital Buildings project, we have considered the following:
- Human Readability
- Machine readability and interpretation
- Composable functionality
- Dimensional Analysis
- Correctness validation
- Cross compatibility
This project is structured as following:
- An ontology that defines the parameters of the semantic data model (Terminology box) and tools for building, validating and associating real equipment with a specific model. It contains the following formats:
- Building Configuration which contains a mapping between the ontology and the "raw" data. Building Config is the Assertion Box.
- Tools which allow the following:
- Yaml Validator which allows to validate the yaml ontology upon a change or an extension.
- RDF/OWL Generator which allows to generate an RDF version from the yaml ontology files.
- Internal Building Representation (IBR) File Format to represent data from different verticals such as spatial, assets.
The learning modules provide an overview of:
- The main concepts of the Digital Buildings Ontology.
- How to model and extend types.
- The Building configuration file concepts.
- The validation tools for the Building Configuration file.
- Introduction to the Digital Buildings Ontology Lesson 1
- Conceptual Model Lesson 2
- Subfields Lesson 3
- Fields Lesson 4
- States and Multi-states Lesson 5
- Entity Types Lesson 6
- Mappings Lesson 7
- Connections Lesson 8
- Namespaces Lesson 9
- Get ready to Data Model Lesson 1
- Determin which devices need to be modeled Lesson 2
- Determin which data points are required Lesson 3
- Name each data point using the DBO Lesson 4
- Propose an ontology extension Lesson 5
- Construct and finalize the building configuration file Lesson 6
- Validate the instance and telemetry Lesson 7
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