The Need for a Comprehensive Ontology for Smart Buildings

Digitization and automation in the building sector are constantly increasing. Developments around the Internet of Things (IoT) also affect this industry. However, due to the lack of common standards, the development of building automation has been complicated, expensive, and slowly progressing. This paper presents an approach to increase the utilization of sensor data. The approach will help develop smart buildings where energy efficiency is increased and where better interaction with surrounding infrastructure is facilitated. The paper’s focus is on ontologies that make communication more intelligent, data labelling more efficient and utilization of collected and real-time data more expedient relative to the building's performance, area utilization and user experience. The idea is not to replace existing ontologies, but to create an overarching structure that connects essential concepts representing different perspectives of a building and interactions with surrounding infrastructure. We call this structure a hyper-ontology. The presented in the paper approach reflects ongoing work in the project DataCat.