Towards a Smart Campus Digital Twin: Promoting Awareness and Sustainability Through Wayfinding and Real-Time Environmental Data

The newly inaugurated Navile District of the University of Bologna is a complex created along the Navile canal, that now houses various teaching and research activities for the disciplines of Chemistry, Industrial Chemistry, Pharmacy, Biotechnology and Astronomy. A Building Information Modeling system (BIM) gives staff of the Navile campus several ways to monitor buildings in the complex throughout their life cycle, one of which is the ability to access real-time environmental data such as room temperature, humidity, air composition, and more, thereby simplifying operations like finding faults and optimizing environmental resource usage. But smart features at Navile are not only available to the staff: AlmaMap Navile is a web application, whose development is documented in this thesis, that powers the public touch kiosks available throughout the campus, offering maps of the district and indications on how to reach buildings and spaces. Even if these two systems, BIM and AlmaMap, don't seem to have many similarities, they share the common intent of promoting awareness for informed decision making in the campus, and they do it while relying on web standards for communication. This opens up interesting possibilities, and is the idea behind AlmaMap Navile 2.0, an app that interfaces with the BIM system and combines real-time sensor data with a comfort calculation algorithm, giving users the ability not just to ask for directions to a space, but also to see its comfort level in advance and, should they want to, check environmental measurements coming from each sensor in a granular manner. The end result is a first step towards building a smart campus Digital Twin, that can support all the people who are part of the campus life in their daily activities, improving their efficiency and satisfaction, giving them the ability to make informed decisions, and promoting awareness and sustainability.

Il linguaggio valutativo nel bilancio di sostenibilità: analisi trilingue basata su corpora

The aim of this dissertation is to analyze the language of evaluation in Italian, English and French sustainability reports in order to observe how firms build their corporate image and to investigate the kind of relationship they develop with their stakeholders. The analysis is carried out by applying Martin & White's Appraisal theory and corpus linguistics methods. For the purposes of this research, a multilingual specialized corpus of sustainability reports has been created, which is the result of two different levels of compilation. At the first level, three sub-corpora have been created with the aim of representing three different languages (Italian, English and French): at this level, the research on evaluative language will show that a standardization process of sustainability reports is underway. At the second level of compilation, each of the three sub-corpora has been split in two further sub-corpora, representative of two different business sectors: at this level, the research will show how the sector where firms operate directly influences the choice of the topics to be discussed. The first chapter of this dissertation introduces the concept of evaluative language, with a particular focus on the framework of Appraisal theory. The second chapter deals with corpus linguistics and describes different types of corpora, the search methods and the criteria for the compilation of corpora. The third chapter discusses the concepts of Corporate Social Responsibility and sustainability reports, focusing mainly on the reporting principles and the linguistic patterns of this genre, and provides an overview of the main guidelines and certifications for the reporting of sustainability actions. Chapter four is dedicated to the description of the methodology used for this research, while the last chapter presents and discusses the results of the analysis, in an attempt to draw generalizations on the use of evaluative language in this emerging genre.