A roadmap toward a unified ontology for building service systems in the AECO industry

Funding Information: The research within the project EnergyTWIN leading to these results has received funding from the German Ministry for Industry and Energy under grant agreement no. 03EN1026A. Publisher Copyright: © 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors.Building service systems are complex structures consisting of different subsystems and components in varying relationships. Semantic Web Technologies (SWT) can be used to represent these systems in decentralized triplestores using ontologies. To describe interconnected building service systems and the flow of matter, energy and data between them over the whole life-cycle in the context of the Architecture, Engineering, Construction and Operation (AECO) industry, two recent contributions, TUBES System Ontology (TSO) and Flow System Ontology (FSO) have to be considered. This study thus supports the effort towards a future semantic web of building data by validating the given ontologies based on Competency Questions (CQs) and an application example, proposing an alignment of TSO v0.3.0 and FSO v0.1.0 and providing a roadmap to a unified representation of building service systems in the AECO industry.Peer reviewe