Ontology-enabled Digital Building Logbooks for Facility Management

Construction industry is characterized by highly fragmented and scarcely interoperable processes. The use of a Digital Building Logbook (DBL), as a common repository for building information, would facilitate data management for the several stakeholders involved in the construction process. However, the heterogeneity of different sources makes the interoperability management fundamental to enable an enhanced information exchange. By exploiting the potentialities of ontologies in addressing the interoperability need, the paper presents an ontology-enabled DBL. The proposed framework provides a complete building overview, describing spatial information, systems and components, maintenance, operation but also energy and sensing data. It is built following a federation approach, combining building existing ontologies after investigating whether they may meet similar requirements. The paper describes the methodology adopted in order to develop a framework as flexible as possible to accommodate various ontologies that represent specific building domains in different ways according to the case study of interest. The result is a system that can act as a gateway for connecting several areas along the building life cycle, with the main objective of enhancing data access and information extraction, to have an interdisciplinary knowledge, and to make data-driven decisions.