Cooperation between leading industry standards supercharges the digital transformation of the real estate and smart building industry

Today the Brick Consortium and RealEstateCore announce the availability of a public preview release of the new standard that makes it easier to create rich semantic models of smart buildings and real estate portfolios. Currently, at-scale digital transformation in the real estate industry, within and across organizational boundaries, is challenging because of the number of competing smart building metadata standards. These standards often have significant overlap in features, but are not directly compatible, making it difficult for building stakeholders to exchange data and application developers to be able to fully support all building systems. 

The new standard that now is ready to be used in real projects is a combination of the Brick Schema and RealEstateCore leading metadata standards for smart buildings. During the past six months, the two groups have carried out extensive work to harmonize the two projects, resulting in a new, clarified metadata solution, removing the need to choose between the Brick Schema and RealEstateCore.

“The Brick Schema and RealEstateCore combine the best of two worlds. We have created a complete open-source standard based on semantic web technologies which the industry can use efficiently for a long time. We enable buildings to become good inhabitants of smart cities and contribute to reducing carbon emissions.” Gabriel Fierro (Brick Consortium) and Erik Wallin (RealEstateCore Consortium)

You can find out more information about the standards and how to start using them here:

https://github.com/RealEstateCore/REC4 and https://github.com/BrickSchema/Brick/tree/v1.3.0

The public preview release of Brick Schema 1.3 and RealEstateCore 4.0 includes much of the technological foundation necessary to make the harmonization possible while letting each standard preserve backwards compatibility with the previous versions of their respective standards. Full harmonization will occur in future releases of the two standards, which is expected to occur quickly after the August release.

The two standards will continue to exist as standalone projects, each managed by their respective consortium. The combination of Brick Schema and RealEstateCore comprehensively covers the following domains:

• • Building management systems (e.g. HVAC, Access control, Elevator)
  • Business administration systems (e.g. CAFM, ERP, Sustainability reporting)
  • IoT devices (e.g. Indoor climate, People counting)
  • Blueprints (e.g. Building information modeling, DWG)

These integrated, complete standards allow the real estate industry to drive the digital transformation forward in line with expectations from tenants, building owners, and society, achieving the objectives of lowering carbon emissions and contributing to a sustainable smart city. The Brick Schema and RealEstateCore harmonization enables real estate owners and other stakeholders to unlock the value of the data in their buildings, supporting new applications for reducing energy consumption, and interacting with energy sources and grids, enhancing the tenant experience, automated facility management, and more.

The harmonization of the two standards is also being done with an eye towards compatibility with the upcoming ASHRAE 223 standard.

You can also register your interest for the annual RECon event that will be held during the autumn 2022.