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Design and Analysis of a Query Processor for Brick

Published: 27 November 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Brick is a recently proposed metadata schema and ontology for describing building components and the relationships between them. It represents buildings as directed labeled graphs using the RDF data model. Using the SPARQL query language, building-agnostic applications query a Brick graph to discover the set of resources and relationships they require to operate. Latency-sensitive applications, such as user interfaces, demand response, and model-predictive control, require fast queries—conventionally less than 100ms.
We benchmark a set of popular open source and commercial SPARQL databases against three real Brick models using seven application queries and find that none of them meet this performance target. This lack of performance can be attributed to design decisions that optimize for queries over large graphs consisting of billions of triples but give poor spatial locality and join performance on the small dense graphs typical of Brick. We present the design and evaluation of HodDB, a RDF/SPARQL database for Brick built over a node-based index structure. HodDB performs Brick queries 3--700× faster than leading SPARQL databases and consistently meets the 100ms threshold, enabling the portability of important latency-sensitive building applications.
This article is an extension of a previously published work [16].

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Cited By

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  • (2024)BuildingSage: A safe and secure AI copilot for smart buildingsProceedings of the 11th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings, Cities, and Transportation10.1145/3671127.3699677(369-374)Online publication date: 29-Oct-2024
  • (2021)Query relaxation for portable brick-based applicationsProceedings of the 8th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings, Cities, and Transportation10.1145/3486611.3486671(150-159)Online publication date: 17-Nov-2021
  • (2021)A case study comparing the completeness and expressiveness of two industry recognized ontologiesAdvanced Engineering Informatics10.1016/j.aei.2020.10123347(101233)Online publication date: Jan-2021
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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks
ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks  Volume 14, Issue 3-4
Special Issue on BuildSys'17
November 2018
392 pages
ISSN:1550-4859
EISSN:1550-4867
DOI:10.1145/3294070
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Publication History

Published: 27 November 2018
Accepted: 01 March 2018
Received: 01 January 2018
Published in TOSN Volume 14, Issue 3-4

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Author Tags

  1. RDF
  2. SPARQL
  3. Smart buildings
  4. building management
  5. graph database
  6. metadata

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)BuildingSage: A safe and secure AI copilot for smart buildingsProceedings of the 11th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings, Cities, and Transportation10.1145/3671127.3699677(369-374)Online publication date: 29-Oct-2024
  • (2021)Query relaxation for portable brick-based applicationsProceedings of the 8th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings, Cities, and Transportation10.1145/3486611.3486671(150-159)Online publication date: 17-Nov-2021
  • (2021)A case study comparing the completeness and expressiveness of two industry recognized ontologiesAdvanced Engineering Informatics10.1016/j.aei.2020.10123347(101233)Online publication date: Jan-2021
  • (2020)Shepherding Metadata Through the Building LifecycleProceedings of the 7th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings, Cities, and Transportation10.1145/3408308.3427627(70-79)Online publication date: 18-Nov-2020
  • (2020)A review of ontologies within the domain of smart and ongoing commissioningBuilding and Environment10.1016/j.buildenv.2020.107099(107099)Online publication date: Jul-2020
  • (2020)Building automation system - BIM integration using a linked data structureAutomation in Construction10.1016/j.autcon.2020.103257118(103257)Online publication date: Oct-2020
  • (2019)Autonomous Living Building: Adapting to Occupant’s Behavior2019 15th International Wireless Communications & Mobile Computing Conference (IWCMC)10.1109/IWCMC.2019.8766447(1803-1808)Online publication date: Jun-2019

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