A Systematic Comparison and Evaluation of Building Ontologies for Deploying Data-Driven Analytics in Smart Buildings

2026-03-15

AI Summary

Existing building ontologies exhibit semantic discrepancies that hinder data interoperability and reuse. This study presents the first systematic evaluation of four prominent building ontologies—Brick Schema, RealEstateCore, Project Haystack, and Google Digital Buildings—by jointly considering both TBox (axiomatic definitions) and ABox (instance assertions) dimensions, leveraging the OQuaRE quality assessment framework and empirical data from the building domain. The findings reveal that Project Haystack and Brick Schema feature more compact axiomatizations, while Brick Schema and RealEstateCore demonstrate superior expressiveness and completeness. These results indicate that no single ontology currently offers universal applicability across all building-related use cases. This work provides both methodological guidance and empirical evidence to support ontology alignment, integration, and selection in practice.

Technology Category

• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Ontologies
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Satisfiability Modulo Theories
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Semantic Web

Application Category

• Semantics and Knowledge: Scalable techniques for the creation, curation, publication, maintenance, and consumption of large, Web-based, structured, reusable, knowledge graphs and ontologies
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web performance, measurement, and characterization

Abstract

Ontologies play a critical role in data exchange, information integration, and knowledge sharing across diverse smart building applications. Yet, semantic differences between the prevailing building ontologies hamper their purpose of bringing data interoperability and restrict the ability to reuse building ontologies in real-world applications. In this paper, we propose and adopt a framework to conduct a systematic comparison and evaluation of four popular building ontologies (Brick Schema, RealEstateCore, Project Haystack and Google's Digital Buildings) from both axiomatic design and assertions in a use case, namely the Terminological Box (TBox) evaluation and the Assertion Box (ABox) evaluation. In the TBox evaluation, we use the SQuaRE-based Ontology Quality Evaluation (OQuaRE) Framework and concede that Project Haystack and Brick Schema are more compact with respect to the ontology axiomatic design. In the ABox evaluation, we apply an empirical study with sample building data that suggests that Brick Schema and RealEstateCore have greater completeness and expressiveness in capturing the main concepts and relations within the building domain. The results implicitly indicate that there is no universal building ontology for integrating Linked Building Data (LBD). We also discuss ontology compatibility and investigate building ontology design patterns (ODPs) to support ontology matching, alignment, and harmonisation.

Problem

• building ontologies
• data interoperability
• semantic differences
• ontology reuse
• smart buildings

Innovation

• ontology evaluation
• smart buildings
• TBox and ABox analysis
• ontology design patterns
• linked building data