BIM-to-BRICK: Using graph modeling for IoT/BMS and spatial semantic data interoperability within digital data models of buildings

The holistic management of a building requires data from heterogeneous sources such as building management systems (BMS), Internet-of-Things (IoT) sensor networks, and building information models (BIM), all aimed at environmental well-being. Data interoperability is a key component to eliminate silos of information, and using semantic web technologies like the BRICK schema, an effort to standardize semantic descriptions of the physical, logical, and virtual assets in buildings and the relationships between them, is a suitable approach. However, current data integration processes can involve significant manual interventions. This paper presents a methodology to automatically collect, assemble, and integrate information from a building information model into a knowledge graph. The resulting application, BIM-to-BRICK, is implemented on a higher education case study building in a tropical climate. BIM-to-BRICK generated a bidirectional link between a BIM model of 932 instances and experimental data collected for 17 subjects into 458 BRICK objects and 1219 relationships in 17 s. The automation of this approach can be compared to traditional manual mapping of data types. This scientific innovation incentivizes the convergence of disparate data types required for achieving and enhancing environmental comfort conditions and other strategic built-environment applications.