Metadata Schema Generation for Data-driven Smart Buildings

A smart building is a combination of advanced information systems originating from different domains. Domains such as design and construction, maintenance, energy management, automation & control have complex yet important relationships, and ensuring their connectivity is crucial for building operations. Semantic web technologies can be used to model and link these domains and their relationships using domain ontologies. To that end, there are a number of smart building ontologies that are available in each domain. However, the process of generating a metadata schema by using those ontologies for a given building is not investigated adequately. Further, such tools that generate those metadata schemas are rare. Therefore, this study presents a semi-automatic metadata schema generator using an ontology database and a text search engine. The proposed approach is applied to a campus building. Building Automation System metadata was used in the metadata schema generator. Finally, this study shows how the generated metadata scheme can be used to efficiently query and visualize time-series data for developing data-driven smart building applications.