Brick Consortium

brick
Created on Jun 16th, 2022

The Brick Consortium, Inc. is a non-profit membership corporation whose purpose is to encourage the research and development of Brick Schema Specifications for the built environment and any supporting tooling, documentation, and best practices necessary to promote Brick. The consortium develops the Brick Schema Specifications as open source through member participation.

The consortium, through the Brick schema, addresses an important industry and societal need by helping to make data of the built environment interoperable. The consortium is made up of researchers, technology providers, integrators, and building operators, and will serve as an organization that can provide the long-term support necessary to maintain and enhance the Brick schema until 2040 and beyond. The consortium provides governance for the Brick Schema specifications and conformance testing protocols, and provides tooling and a repository of reference models and canonical use cases. The consortium also funds the research of work related to Brick and the built environment and works to evangelize the use of the Brick schema.

The consortium is committed to ensuring the Brick specification is not encumbered with proprietary intellectual property.

The rules of the consortium are available for review, as is a membership form. We hosted a virtual open house in 2021, and the video and slides are available.

Members

Brick is an open-source effort to standardize semantic descriptions of the physical, logical and virtual assets in buildings and the relationships between them. Brick consists of an extensible dictionary of terms and concepts in and around buildings, a set of relationships for linking and composing concepts together, and a flexible data model permitting seamless integration of Brick with existing tools and databases. Through the use of powerful Semantic Web technology, Brick can describe the broad set of idiosyncratic and custom features, assets and subsystems found across the building stock in a consistent matter.

Adopting Brick as the canonical description of a building enables the following:

  • Brick lowers the cost of deploying analytics, energy efficiency measures and intelligent controls across buildings
  • Brick presents an integrated, cross-vendor representation of the multitude of subsystems in modern buildings: HVAC, lighting, fire, security and so on
  • Brick simplifies the development of smart analytics and control applications
  • Brick reduces the reliance upon the non-standard, unstructured labels endemic to building management systems

Brick is free and open-sourced under the BSD 3-Clause license. The source code for Brick, this website, and related tools developed by the Brick team are available on GitHub.