Modeling building semantics: providing feedback and sustainability

Even minor changes in user activity can bring about significant energy savings within built space. Many building performance assessment methods have been developed, however these often disregard the impact of user behavior (i.e. the social, cultural and organizational aspects of the building). Building users currently have limited means of determining how sustainable they are, in context of the specific building structure and/or when compared to other users performing similar activities, it is therefore easy for users to dismiss their energy use. To support sustainability, buildings must be able to monitor energy use, identify areas of potential change in the context of user activity and provide contextually relevant information to facilitate persuasion management. If the building is able to provide users with detailed information about how specific user activity that is wasteful, this should provide considerable motivation to implement positive change. This paper proposes using a dynamic and temporal semantic model, to populate information within a model of persuasion, to manage user change. By semantically mapping a building, and linking this to persuasion management we suggest that: i) building energy use can be monitored and analyzed over time; ii) persuasive management can be facilitated to move user activity towards sustainability.