Efficient Management and Compliance Check of HVAC Information in the Building Design Phase Using Semantic Web Technologies

Several OWL ontologies have been developed for the AEC industry to manage domain-specific information, yet they often overlook the domain of building services and HVAC components. The Flow Systems Ontology was recently proposed to address this need, but it does not include HVAC components’ size and capacity-related properties. Also, despite their strengths in representing domain-specific knowledge, ontologies cannot efficiently identify poor data quality in BIM models. A four-fold contribution is made in this research paper to define and improve the data quality of HVAC information by (1) extending the existing Flow Systems Ontology, (2) proposing the new Flow Properties Ontology, (3) proposing an HVAC rule set for compliance checking, and (4), moreover, we use Semantic Web technologies to demonstrate the benefits of efficient HVAC data management when sizing components. The demonstration case shows that we can represent the data model in a distributed way, validate it using 36 SHACL shapes and use SPARQL to determine the pressure and flow rate of fans and pumps.