Semantic material name matching system for building energy analysis

As an importance of saving energy in building sector and reducing greenhouse gas emissions is rapidly growing, many tools for building energy analysis (BEA) have been developed. However, such tools still have much room for improvement: manual input of thermal properties of a building material; input of incorrect data; and semantic conflicts between building designers and engineers. This research proposes a semantic material name matching system to find a standardized material name and its associated material property values, and enter them into a BEA tool. The core of our approach is to define ontologies capturing the concepts associated with the standard materials and their property values that are required by BEA tools. The proposed system uses an IFCXML file of a building information model as a source of input data, captures material data in the files, and automates the process of material property input. Using the proposed system, engineers will be able to increase their efficiency in entering required data into BEA tools and to reduce the possibility of erroneous data input.