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.

翻译：本体在多样化的智能建筑应用中，对于数据交换、信息集成和知识共享起着至关重要的作用。然而，主流建筑本体之间的语义差异阻碍了其实现数据互操作性的目标，并限制了建筑本体在实际应用中的复用能力。本文提出并采用一个框架，从公理化设计和使用案例中的断言两个维度，对四种流行的建筑本体（Brick Schema、RealEstateCore、Project Haystack 和 Google's Digital Buildings）进行系统性比较与评估，即术语箱（TBox）评估和断言箱（ABox）评估。在TBox评估中，我们使用基于SQuaRE的本体质量评估（OQuaRE）框架，并认为Project Haystack和Brick Schema在本体公理化设计方面更为紧凑。在ABox评估中，我们通过对样本建筑数据进行实证研究，结果表明Brick Schema和RealEstateCore在捕捉建筑领域内的主要概念和关系方面具有更高的完备性和表达能力。这些结果间接表明，不存在一个通用的建筑本体可用于集成关联建筑数据（LBD）。我们还讨论了本体兼容性，并研究了建筑本体设计模式（ODPs）以支持本体匹配、对齐与协调。