Linked data for the life cycle assessment of built assets

Authors

Boje C., Navarrete T., Kubicki S., Beach T.

Reference

CEUR Workshop Proceedings, vol. 3633, pp. 11-22, 2023

Description

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a scientific method for the quantification of environmental impacts on a product system, which is important for sustainable design and management of our built environment. Conducting LCA on buildings requires access to highly contextualized information which can be sourced from the Building Information Model (BIM) or monitoring systems in place. The interoperability between LCA domain tools and BIM tools is lacking. Our motivation lies in semantically bridging LCA and built environment domains by adopting a Semantic Web (SW) technologies. This would result in increased interoperability on the web, increased automation of information pipelines and more explainable impacts of complex contexts. In this paper we introduce the work in progress under the SemanticLCA ontology where we modelled several use cases for LCA of built assets. To demonstrate this, we showcase one case study at the building level, highlighting the semantic alignments between BIM models, LCA data and sensing devices. The paper discusses the implementation challenges and offers suggestions on how such an ontology can be used in the future.