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BrickSchema / Brick

Uniform metadata schema for buildings
http://brickschema.org/
BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License
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external classifications (maybe in the ref schema?) #519

Open epaulson opened 1 year ago

epaulson commented 1 year ago

We've talked about this over the years, but with the ref schema I think we have a nice home for it. In the IFC/BIM/CSI world, they have a relatively shallow class hierarchy of "things" and instead rely on an external classification scheme like Omniclass to add in additional information. Omniclass is not the only game in town, and in fact some companies use entirely home-grown classification systems. The Autodesk white paper is a good background: https://interoperability.autodesk.com/classificationmanager/downloads/Autodesk%20Whitepaper%20-%20Classification%20Systems.pdf

It would be nice to add some support into Brick/ref schema to let us say that an entity can be classified as something in that external system. It should be generic so we can make statements about how an entity is classified under multiple classification systems.

The property should be able to apply to specific entities, but we should also be able to include some common classifications and just include them in Brick, e.g. we can say that the class brick:Air_Handling_Unit corresponds to Omniclass 23-33 25 00 and maybe have some optional SHACL rules that can stick that on entities of the class.

I don't want to delete any of the classes currently in Brick and I'm not sure that we want to go down a road where we encourage most Brick users to query by classification types, but this does feel like it might be useful.

gtfierro commented 1 year ago

I have something similar in here already with the VBIS alignment (https://github.com/BrickSchema/Brick/tree/master/alignments/vbis) though I could see us moving that code into the ref-schema so that it's not Brick specific (the mapping between Brick classes and VBIS tags would probably move into 'extensions')

epaulson commented 11 months ago

Another classification system we should add is to be able to say which Brick/REC space classes match to which ASHRAE 62.1 occupancy categories, since ASHRAE has specific guidance for how much air should flow into different space types (see table 6-1 or appendix J of this; https://ashrae.iwrapper.com/ASHRAE_PREVIEW_ONLY_STANDARDS/STD_62.1_2022 )

(I don't know if there's a nice version of 62.1 in RDF from anywhere in ASHRAE, but maybe that'd be useful in 223 @JoelBender? )

JoelBender commented 11 months ago

In a word, yes! Great idea. I sent a request to Mark Weber, Manager of Standards, to get in contact with the SSPC 62.1 chair. Ultimately it would be up to that committee to produce the taxonomy/ontology and make it part of their ongoing development process. Perhaps it will end up being the GDL 42P Subcommittee, like the GDL 36 "informative annex" part of 223 should be owned by that group.