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 follows:
- 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 that allow the following:
- ABEL generates from/to Google spreadsheet/Building Configuration.
- Explorer allows users to explorer the ontology types and their associated fields.
- 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.
In this module, you’ll fully explore the core modeling and organizational concepts of the DBO. These are essential concepts for data modeling and creating building configuration files.
- Lesson 1: Introduction to the DBO
- Lesson 2: Conceptual Model
- Lesson 3: Subfields
- Lesson 4: Fields
- Lesson 5: States and Multi-states
- Lesson 6: Entity Types
- Lesson 7: Mappings
- Lesson 8: Connections
- Lesson 9: Namespaces
In this module, you’ll deepen your understanding of the DBO and practice applying it. Through several hands-on activities, you'll walk through the recommended workflow for creating a building configuration file
- Lesson 1: Get Ready to data model
- Lesson 2: Determine which devices need to be modeled
- Lesson 3: Determine which data points are required
- Lesson 4: Name each data point using the DBO
- Lesson 5: Propose an ontology extension
- Lesson 6: Construct and finalize the building configuration file
- Lesson 7: Validate the instance and telemetry
Please post issues in Issues section.
Open mailing list to discuss Google's Digital Building effort. The discussion could include general questions, standards, APIs, and more. google-digital-building-discuss@googlegroups.com
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