ADAPT Undergraduate Students as Researchers
Programme
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Institution/Team:
Project Title:
Suitable for
students who
are studying in
the following
areas:
Skills needed:
Project
Description:
Kris McGlinn, Dave Lewis, Knowledge and Data Engineering Group, SWIMing project www.swiming-project.eu
Linked Building Data for Information Modelling in Energy Efficient Buildings
Linked Data, Building Information Modelling (BIM), Energy Efficient Buildings (EeB),
Interoperability, Data Integration, Semantic Web Technologies.
Self-motivated with strong programming skills. Experience with web technologies are required,
familiarity with BIM and EeB are a plus;
Energy efficiency has become an important topic due to the risks of rising levels of CO2 from burning
fossil fuels, and the costs and security issues related to importing energy. By using energy more
efficiently, Europeans can lower their energy bills, reduce their reliance on external suppliers of oil
and gas and help protect the environment. In the EU, buildings are a major source of energy use,
responsible for 40% of energy consumption and 36% of CO2 emissions. Methods which improve
efficiency in buildings will therefore go towards reducing not only European energy consumption, but
may also help reduce future energy needs across the world.
Managing the large amounts of heterogeneous data generated throughout a buildings life cycle
(BLC), which includes its design, construction and operation, and making it available to processes
which manage a buildings energy consumption is a significant challenge. Building data (BD) can
originate from sources as diverse as pdf and word documents, which describe building devices, to
complex 2D and 3D models of the buildings geometry and materials, to data generated by building
monitoring and control systems, which is stored in csv files or SQL databases, to data generated by
building simulation tools, stored in proprietary formats. You will be working towards making this data
accessible to tools and services along the BLC.
This internship therefore represents an excellent opportunity to collaborate with world-class
researchers in the study of building data management to support novel energy management
processes. You will examine existing BD standards and semantic web technologies, in particular,
Linked Data, as tools to support interoperability across the BLC. As an intern, you will meet with a
wide variety of experts, attend workshops and summer schools, so that you may deepen your
knowledge and improve your skills in a growing area of important research.
Figure 1 Overview of BIM across BLC Energy Management
The Role of the
student &
benefits gained
from
participation in
this project:
1
Who will be
working with
you?
Short
description of
the group:
Recommended
Reading
Material:
Your main role will be to examine existing building data models in the energy efficient building
domain and look at the process of uplifting these data models to linked data. You will work closely
with existing Energy Efficient Building (EeB) FP7 European projects, as well as the W3C Linked
Building Data community group and BuildingSmart working group, examining use cases and
determining which can best benefit from the LD approach.
You will also become skilled working with Linked Data technologies, for example, making use of a
Fuseki RDF server to upload ifcOWL, and SPARQL queries to map data models to ifcOWL
concepts. In this capacity, you will work towards the development of a methodology for uplifting
existing building data models to this and other relevant knowledge representations.
You may also be required to do some development on client side web apps to support this process
using, for example, HTML5 technologies.
You will be working closely with Dr. Kris McGlinn, PI for the SWIMing project – www.swimingproject.eu
You will also have support from Prof. Dave Lewis, who has worked on similar projects: Lider and PI
for Falcon, in the multilingual domain, and who is also an integral part of the ADAPT Centre.
Dr. Kris McGlinn, PI for the SWIMing project.
Prof. Dave Lewis, Director of the Knowledge and Data Engineering Group (KDEG)
www.swiming-project.eu
https://www.w3.org/community/lbd/
http://linkedbuildingdata.net/
Relationships-Between-Linked-Open-Data-and-BIM http://www.coventry.ac.uk/Global/Faculty%20events/SB13/SB13-19-Relationships-Between-LinkedOpen-Data-and-BIM.pdf
Building Optimisation using Linked Data https://www.deri.ie/sites/default/files/publications/curry_ldac_2012.pdf
BIM handbook: A guide to building information modeling for owners, managers, designers, engineers
and contractors - Chuck Eastman et al.
Other
information:
For further
details on this
project please
contact:
1
Name:
Phone:
E-Mail:
Website:
Kris McGlinn
086 054 9342
[email protected]
www.swiming-project.eu
This is an initial description of the role of the student and it is liable to change following discussions
between the investigators and the student.