A Systematic Comparison and Evaluation of Building Ontologies for Deploying Data-Driven Analytics in Smart Buildings

Ontologies play a critical role in data exchange, information integration, and knowledge sharing across diverse smart building applications. Yet, semantic differences between the prevailing building ontologies hamper their purpose of bringing data interoperability and restrict the ability to reuse building ontologies in real-world applications. In this paper, we propose and adopt a framework to conduct a systematic comparison and evaluation of four popular building ontologies (Brick Schema, RealEstateCore, Project Haystack and Google's Digital Buildings) from both axiomatic design and assertions in a use case, namely the Terminological Box (TBox) evaluation and the Assertion Box (ABox) evaluation. In the TBox evaluation, we use the SQuaRE-based Ontology Quality Evaluation (OQuaRE) Framework and concede that Project Haystack and Brick Schema are more compact with respect to the ontology axiomatic design. In the ABox evaluation, we apply an empirical study with sample building data that suggests that Brick Schema and RealEstateCore have greater completeness and expressiveness in capturing the main concepts and relations within the building domain. The results implicitly indicate that there is no universal building ontology for integrating Linked Building Data (LBD). We also discuss ontology compatibility and investigate building ontology design patterns (ODPs) to support ontology matching, alignment, and harmonisation.

A System's Approach Taxonomy for User-Centred XAI: A Survey

Recent advancements in AI have coincided with ever-increasing efforts in the research community to investigate, classify and evaluate various methods aimed at making AI models explainable. However, most of existing attempts present a method-centric view of eXplainable AI (XAI) which is typically meaningful only for domain experts. There is an apparent lack of a robust qualitative and quantitative performance framework that evaluates the suitability of explanations for different types of users. We survey relevant efforts, and then, propose a unified, inclusive and user-centred taxonomy for XAI based on the principles of General System's Theory, which serves us as a basis for evaluating the appropriateness of XAI approaches for all user types, including both developers and end users.