###A digital ontology for human-centred decision-making in a circular built environment
Project ID: 2228bd1176 (You will need this ID for your application)
Research Theme: Circular Economy
UCL Lead department: Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction
Lead Supervisor: Selcuk Cidik
Project Summary:
The built environment is a major contributor of the carbon emissions and natural resource consumption. For this reason, enabling a circular built environment has become a priority across the globe. There is a consensus that digital data and technologies will be essential to enable circularity in the built environment. Thus, there are multiple efforts to develop the digital capabilities to support the necessary change, such as through digital material passports, IoT ecosystems and Artificial Intelligence. However, these efforts are typically siloed, proprietary, and they don’t consider or coordinate with others developing solutions towards similar ends. Hence, there is a growing risk that the fragmentation between the digital technologies and data will prevent holistic decision-making to enable a circular built environment.
Ontology engineering is central to addressing this challenge. It provides a methodology for developing knowledge representations to enable both semantic and digital interoperability. Thus, developing an ontology for holistic decision-making can significantly contribute to enabling a circular built environment by addressing the issues of data variance and complexity.
This project aims to develop a digital ontology to support holistic decision-making in a digitalised, circular built environment. The project will adopt a human-centred decision-making approach to developing the ontology. This means that the stakeholders’ information requirements for decision-making will underpin the development of the new ontology. This will ensure that data from various digital technologies can be meaningfully collated, interrelated, queried, and presented to key decision-makers in a digitalised, circular built environment. The project will significantly contribute to the knowledge in the areas of circular economy, digital ontologies, and human-centred decision-making through better human-data interaction, which are all areas of key interest to EPSRC.
The ideal candidate will have a background in data science, computer science or engineering with a keen interest in interdisciplinary research involving decision and human-computer interaction studies.