In the spirit of the ground-breaking result of Bourgain--Brezis--Mironescu, we establish some characterizations of Sobolev functions in metric measure spaces including fractals like the Vicsek set, the Sierpi\'{ n}ski gasket and the Sierpi\'{ n}ski carpet. As corollaries of our characterizations, we present equivalent norms on the Korevaar--Schoen--Sobolev space, and show that the domain of a $p$-energy form is identified with a Besov-type function space under a suitable $(p,p)$-Poincar\'e inequality, capacity upper bound and the volume doubling property.
Categories: math.FA