OntoSage: Intelligent Human-Building Smartbot for Semantic Smart Building Question Answering

Abstract

Smart buildings remain heterogeneous across sensing infrastructure, metadata quality, legacy protocols, and analytics requirements, hindering reusable human–building natural language interfaces. We present OntoSage, a modular framework for ontologically grounded question answering (QA) and fulfillment of analytic intents over smart building data. The framework (i) leverages Brick Schema-based RDF model with reasoning capabilities, (ii) translates natural language (NL) questions into executable SPARQL via a fine-tuned seq2seq model (T5-Base), and (iii) orchestrates portable analytics microservices that operate on time-series sensor data referenced through ontology-linked UUIDs. A summarization component (open-weights Mistral-7B, zero-shot) converts structured SPARQL/SQL/analytic outputs into concise stakeholder-aware responses without requiring task-specific fine-tuning. We categorize QA complexity into four reasoning classes and report component-level execution metrics supporting these categories. To address portability, we formalize a lightweight adaptation workflow (ontology ingestionentity enrichment for NLUNL2SPARQL validity checksanalytics binding) designed to minimize per-building retraining. Reproducibility is enabled through public source code, synthetic and ontology-derived datasets, Docker/Compose service descriptors, and documented supporting scripts “(https://github.com/suhasdevmane/OntoBot)”. The developers’ documentation is publicly accessible “(https://ontosage-docs.github.io)”.