An Improved API and User Experience for the Mortar Testbed.

The lack of access to real-world building data has long been a significant barrier to the development and evaluation of robust applications and analyses that operate on the built environment. The Mortar platform is an open testbed for portable building analytics containing timeseries data for over 100 buildings as well as rich semantic descriptions of the assets and data sources in buildings. Access to Mortar's data is performed through an API which enforces a staged application architecture intended to simplify the development and deployment of analytics applications across a large number of buildings. In practice, users felt overly constrained by the structure enforced by the API and needed a mechanism for discovering the data available in the testbed. In this demonstration, we present (1) an improved, declarative, API for Mortar that decouples application structure from data access, and (2) an interactive query builder interface that assists users in data discovery and in authoring Brick models.