Towards Linked Building Data: A Data Framework Enabling BEM Interoperability with Extended Brick Ontology

Building Energy Modeling (BEM) aims to quantify the energy performance of buildings to help designers and architects better understand the environmental impact of their decisions. BEM comprises a large amount of valuable data such as HVAC equipment, thermal envelope, and occupant behavior. It can be applied for building energy simulation, prediction, optimization, etc. Nevertheless, it typically uses a proprietary data format depending on the BEM tool which makes it a disparate data silo and hinders its interoperability with other data sources. Therefore some cross-domain applications that require the integration of data from different sources including BEM, are not easy to implement. In this work, a data framework for BEM interoperability is proposed based on Brick ontology and its extended concepts. This data framework is viable in real-world implementation by aligning BEM data with semantic web ontology Brick, enabling its interoperability with other data sources, and moving BEM towards linked building data.