VizBrick: A GUI-based Interactive Tool for Authoring Semantic Metadata for Building Datasets

Brick ontology is a unified semantic metadata schema to address the standardization problem of buildings’ physical, logical, and virtual assets and the relationships between them. Creating a Brick model for a building dataset means that the dataset’s contents are semantically described using the standard terms defined in the Brick ontology. It will enable the benefits of data standardization, without having to recollect or reorganize the data and opens the possibility of automation leveraging the machine readability of the semantic metadata. The problem is that authoring Brick models for building datasets often requires knowledge of semantic technology (e.g., ontology declarations and RDF syntax) and leads to repeated manual trial and error processes, which can be time-consuming and challenging to do without an interactive visual representation of the data. We developed VizBrick, a tool with a graphical user interface that can assist users in creating Brick models visually and interactively without having to understand the Resource Description Framework (RDF) syntax. VizBrick provides handy capabilities such as keyword search for easy find of relevant brick concepts and relations to their data columns and automatic suggestions of concept mapping. In this demonstration, we present a use case of VizBrick to showcase how a Brick model can be created for a real world building dataset.