Web of Buildings in Context of Smart City

The increasingly urbanized world, together with networking and digital communication trends in the developing world, have led to explosive growth of city information. Cities can be conceived as data factories that produce and process vast amounts of data on a daily basis, originating from various sources such as people, infrastructure, machines, events, sensors, and smart devices. The newly introduced concept of Smart City, is geared towards improving the competitiveness of urban environments as well as the quality of life of their inhabitants via effective use of city information and exploiting the relationships between people, places, and things. Buildings, as one of the integral parts of cities, play an important role in our daily life. Today, our built environment is not only producing large amounts of data, but driven by the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) it is also starting to talk back and communicate with its inhabitants and the surrounding systems and processes via sensors and data streams. In order to create useful applications and services based on this data, a profound understanding of sensor data, contextual information, and relevant services is required. Currently, this task is done via intensive intervention of domain experts, who are able to understand the implicit semantics of data streams and services. Due to large amounts of data and growing number of available services and data streams in smart city and built environments, these conventional methods are becoming increasingly inefficient and may soon be infeasible. Furthermore, buildings convey useful information that could be harvested in order to realize smart city goals. The information of built environments is currently captured via a wide array of Building Information Modeling (BIM) approaches of the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) domain. Since the building industry is embedded in a complex web of information and actors, there is no universal model that can capture all physical and functional requirements of buildings. As a result, several BIM standards and formats each designed for specific building processes and use cases have emerged. Unfortunately, the interoperability between these BIM-based resources and other city resources is limited. This research proposal aims to investigate and enhance the reciprocal communication between built environments and their surrounding urban infrastructure. To this end, BIM-based resources are processed, aligned, and reconciled to create a uniform and interconnected information space, which is called Web of Buildings (WoB). The WoB is established based on current research work in the BIM and Linked Data domains and gives us a solid base for describing the building services in a machine- interpretable way. The proposed WoB and the introduced services will then facilitate provisioning of the required context for various use cases in IoT and smart city domains.