Building Science is integrative in nature. As such, mastering the body of knowledge of building science naturally leads to achieving proper building integration: horizontal integration between building systems; and vertical integration between building life-cycle phases: planning, design, construction, service-life/maintenance/renovation, and deconstruction/reuse.
The building performance tree analogy shows building performance rooted in service life, economy, and natural environmental requirements. All performance branches are connected in some way to the trunk (people) and dependent on it. The figure emphasizes the central role of people in determining building performance (i.e. the fruits of the performance tree). The health of a tree depends on having the right soil conditions and being judiciously selected (designed) and planted (built) for the right climate (shade, sun, wind).
A Knowledge-based Approach to Building Integration
There is a need for a common language to facilitate the communication of the essential aspects of knowledge that need to be shared among building domains. The starting point to develop such a language is to create a formal representation of the knowledge involved in problem-solving (design, analysis, diagnosis, etc.). Such a representation is called ontology: “A domain ontology is a representation of concepts, relationships, and axioms that forms a foundation of reasoning about a domain” (Janik and Kochut 2008).
The upper ontology represents only higher-level knowledge entities and their relationships. These higher-level entities represent sub-ontologies that are in turn broken down hierarchically to encapsulate increased levels of detail. At lower hierarchical levels, entities between sub-ontologies are interconnected in different ways. Ideally, such an abstraction mechanism would facilitate moving freely between levels of detail, uncover knowledge connections, and looking at building problems from different angles.
The case study below demonstrates the application of these principles: