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 and heterogeneous building portfolio in a scalable way. The project aims to enable management applications and 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:
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:
A model instance configuration (a.k.a building configuration file) that contains a mapping between the ontology and the "raw" real-world data. Building configuration files are the "Assertion box."
Tools that enable the following:
An Internal Building Representation (IBR) file format to represent data from different verticals such as spatial or assets.
The learning modules provide an overview of the following key concepts:
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.
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
Please post issues in the Issues section.
Our team has created an open mailing list to discuss Google's Digital Building effort. The discussion could include general questions, standards, APIs, and more. Join the discussion here: google-digital-building-discuss@googlegroups.com.
Members are expected to adhere to this code of conduct: https://opensource.google.com/conduct.
Please see the contribution section.
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