OntoH2G: A Semantic Model to Represent Building Infrastructure and Occupant Interactions

Abstract

In order to reduce the energy gap originated by the difference between existing tools estimations and real energy consumption, HIT2GAP European H2020 project aims at advancing on building control tools by providing a newer decision-making technology. Technically, HIT2GAP offers a platform inspired by previous reference architectures (e.g., Haystack) and complements them through a knowledge-based model, called OntoH2G, to store building information under a common vocabulary and consequently to enable fine-grained vision of the building with its equipment and occupants. OntoH2G allows to query building data so to extract required information and interesting events (through a set of services). OntoH2G advances over existing models on two main aspects: (i) being compliant with well-known ontologies in different domains in order to cover all energy building concepts, and (ii) its ability to represent user/occupant behaviour, preferences, and interactions.

Occupant Activity Detection in Smart Buildings: A Review

“…More generic knowledge-based models for BAS are proposed in [71,72,73,74]. In [71], an ontology called BACS (Building Automation and Control System), is proposed to model information related to BASs (such as control behaviours, physical devices and their locations, smart appliances, and logical topologies of BASs).…”

“…In [71], an ontology called BACS (Building Automation and Control System), is proposed to model information related to BASs (such as control behaviours, physical devices and their locations, smart appliances, and logical topologies of BASs). Another ontology, called OntoH2G, is proposed in [72] to store building information under a common vocabulary and consequently to enable fine-grained vision of buildings with their equipment and occupants. OntoH2G describes building infrastructure, including physical and digital entities, as well as user-building interactions not only in the form of activities but also comfort requirements, user preferences, and other aspects that motivate users to interact with the building.…”

BEMServer: An Open Source Platform for Building Energy Performance Management

“…In the double-blind architecture proposed through the BEMServer, it is necessary to attach semantic to the data extracted from sensors, smart devices, questionnaires, etc. OntoH2G, the formal ontology used at the core of BEMServer (presented in Chbeir et al (2018)), allows to describe building infrastructure, including physical and digital entities, as well as user-building interactions not only in the form of activities but also comfort requirements, user preferences, and other aspects that motivate users to interact with the building. In order to do so, different domain specific ontologies are aligned, among which:…”