Reasoning on human experiences of indoor environments using semantic web technologies

The Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) in a building affects occupants’ well-being and productivity. Traditionally, models are developed to predict IEQ satisfaction from physical measurements. These approaches work fine in a laboratory environment but tend to fail in real-world applications. Recent work focuses on collecting direct human feedback on IEQ. However, existing approaches either lack the ability to capture the multiple dimensions of IEQ or the integration with other domain knowledge, e.g. from building information modeling or building automation systems. To tackle this problem, we have developed a novel approach based on Semantic Web Technologies (SWT) which enable interoperability and reasoning. In this paper, the HBC (Human Comfort in Building) ontology is presented, which formally specifies the domain of IEQ in multiple dimensions and relates it to adjacent domains. An online survey is designed in order to specify ontology requirements and collect human feedbacks for evaluating the ontology. We evaluate the use of the HBC ontology in two use cases in an o ce building: recommendation of spaces based on IEQ factors and recommendation of settings for technical equipment from collected feedbacks.