Brick : Metadata Schema for Portable Smart Building Applications

•Deployment of building energy applications is inhibited by the heterogeneity of metadata.•Brick introduces a semantic model to comprehensively describe building infrastructure.•Schema development based on six commercial buildings, eight energy applications.•Brick uses standard RDF and SPARQL tools to support machine readability and querying.•Brick is an open-source effort; we present a software ecosystem for encouraging the adoption of Brick.