Enhancing Requirement-Information Mapping for Sustainable Buildings: Introducing the SFIR Ontology

Abstract

Achieving a sustainable and decarbonized built environment is critical to meeting global climate and development goals, yet current approaches face barriers. Top-down policies like standards and certifications aim to drive sustainability, while material/building passports gather data for transparency. However, lack of alignment between these approaches disincentivizes investment and risks progress. This research explores using ontologies to enable resilient information flows between buildings and financers to overcome these barriers. By developing a shared ontology, data and reporting can be streamlined across locations to incentivize and demonstrate sustainable investments. The work proposes a hybrid top-down approach for the development of the Sustainable Finance Information Requirement (SFIR) ontology. Initial design shows promise for improving stakeholder coordination and driving sustainability outcomes. This pioneering research lays the groundwork for optimized sustainability information flows but remains exploratory. With rigorous multi-stakeholder collaboration and iterative ontology refinement, this approach could enable improved policy development, decision-making and reporting to unlock sustainable development of the built environment. While the potential is significant, this research represents only an initial step into applying ontologies to enable sustainability policies and data transparency.