Development of an ontology-based semantic building post-occupancy evaluation framework

Abstract

Post-occupancy evaluation (POE) is a systematic method to evaluate the actual building performance against the theoretical design intents after the building has been occupied for some time, to understand how the building is performing and to capture lessons learned. The POE offers an opportunity to investigate the buildings' actual performance based upon the occupants' satisfaction levels in the aspects of building overall design, indoor environmental quality, thermal comfort, etc. However, as the key part of POE, occupant satisfaction assessment (OSA) is a missing link in the building performance evaluation (BPE) domain, and there is not a systematic evaluation method for the OSA. Moreover, it is time-consuming and error-prone to conduct the OSA manually. This paper presents from the end-user's satisfaction perspective a semantic post-occupancy evaluation ontology (POEontology) to facilitate the occupant satisfaction assessment of buildings, with the ultimate aim of optimizing building operation guidelines, and improving occupants' use experience quality and well-being. An ontology-based knowledge model has been developed to capture the fragmented knowledge of building use satisfaction assessment in the POE domain, with the benchmarking evaluation rules encoded in Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) to enable automatic rule-based rating and reasoning. This ontology model also enables the effective OSA-related knowledge retrieving and sharing, and promotes its implementation in the POE domain. A field study has been conducted based upon the Building Use Study (BUS) methodology to validate the proposed ontology framework.