Tooling Working Group Notes

2021-04-20

• have the ontology documentation exist offline, or some kind of other turtle file visualizer?:
  • can self-host it, just by running the brick website (https://github.com/BrickSchema/brick-website)
  • you can drop your own TTL files into the correct directory and it just shows up in the documentation
  • want to be able to display items by namespace --- needs a new annotation on the ontology documentation
  • can this be something that we bake-in to the brickschema package? (g.serve(docs=True)?)
  • would be nice to have the ontology documentation it as a standalone component
• other ways of storing and encoding the turtle files?:
  • ttl is a barrier to use --- it is just a serialziation format
  • we should be able to distribute JSON-LD, RDF-XML, N3 and turtle formats as part of the releases
  • is there a simpler encoding, that is maybe lossy, that would be easier for web developers, etc to work with?
• graphQL encoding of Brick? A definite need for a simpler form that captures the primary features of the ontology
• what is the "next step" that people use the Brick artifacts with?
  • Do they load Brick into a graph database?
  • Do they import Brick definitions into a relational database or ORM?
  • transform into a form for GraphQL or incorporation into web services?
• add a "cleanup" flag to brickschema's expand command -- remove axiomatic triples, filter out non-specific classes + blank nodes
• incorporate some of the annotation function inference rules that Gabe is working on into brickify?
• follow up with the brickify author to get that merged into brickschema:
  • brickify is important because it is a way to develop customzied tools for your team and your buildings and your metadata sources
  • would want to incorporate brickify stuff into the 'shepherding' stack