SEMERGY: APPLICATION OF SEMANTIC WEB TECHNOLOGIES IN PERFORMANCE-GUIDED BUILDING DESIGN OPTIMIZATION

SUMMARY: This contribution presents a comprehensive summary of the first phase of the research project SEMERGY, aimed towards exploring the potential of Semantic Web Technologies to accommodate and support building performance assessment and optimization. Previous research on the adoption of performance assessment tools by the design community suggested that the extensive amount of time, effort and expertise required to accumulate and provide input information for various performance evaluations, limits the application of such tools for improvement of building design in early stages. Even the most rudimentary performance inquiries require large quantities of data regarding the properties of incorporated building materials and systems, climatic conditions, building codes, etc. Much of this data is available on the internet, yet its use is severely hampered by lack of appropriate structure and format. The SEMERGY research and development project was conceived with the aim of acquiring and utilizing the abundant, yet ill-structured building-related data available on the World Wide Web, through implementation of Semantic Web Technologies. This web-based data is utilized within a flexible, multi-objective design optimization environment, incorporating various performance assessment applications. The present contribution describes some of the major challenge