Brick v1.3

(v1.3.0)


Release Notes

v1.3.0

Brick v1.3.0 is the result of more than a year of work by the Brick development team and a growing community of international contributors. This release of Brick contains several major improvements and changes since Brick v1.2.1 as well as a number of bug fixes and smaller additions.

The big features in Brick v1.3.0 are:

  • moving from an OWL-based ontology to a SHACL-based ontology. This allows Brick and Brick tooling to make use of the validation features of SHACL, which will help to ensure that Brick models are consistent and valid. We recommend using the pySHACL project to conduct validation of Brick models. The brickschema package also provides support for validation
  • ref:hasExternalReference is a new relationship that relates Brick entities to their representations in other digital forms, for example IFC models, BACnet networks and timeseries databases. This builds on work on the ref-schema, a new RDF schema for standardizing these external references
  • ability to model meter/submeter hierarchies, their relationships to devices and rooms, and the data they produce
  • ability to model the current value of Points, using brick:lastKnownValue
  • dramatically expanded sets of entity properties, capturing "nameplate" and other static characteristics of Brick entities
  • adding useful semantic annotations to all Brick Point classes with the brick:hasSubstance and brick:hasQuantity properties
  • unit tests added to all Brick examples to ensure they are up-to-date with correct Brick usage
  • additional classes covering, among other things, different kinds of fans, sensors, PV systems
  • return/supply/discharge water have been swapped for entering (return) and leaving (supply/discharge) water
  • instances of deprecated concepts are now marked with warnings during SHACL validation

Many of these major features are documented at https://docs.brickschema.org/ .