Linked data approach for occupant-centric workplace management

The assessment of the quality and performance of existing indoor workplaces plays a crucial role in employees' health, well-being and productivity. In recent years, in order to overcome the limitations of existing Post-Occupancy Evaluation (POE) methods and to improve Facility Management (FM) processes, research has focused on occupant-centric approaches that capture occupants' behaviours and feedback and leverage their interpretation with contextual building conditions. In turn, their implementations have increasingly relied on the integration of Building Information Modeling (BIM), sensor networks and Semantic Web technologies. Nonetheless, their adoption for workplace management purposes still struggles to gain momentum mostly for the lack of an effective semantic representation of the complex mutual interactions between workers and workplace. This contribution proposes a concept for an ontology dedicated to the integration of worker-generated data, collected through the Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) method, with workplace's observable conditions, to enable the extraction of insights that can drive managers' decisions for the improvement of employees' well-being and productivity. The scope is restricted to office environments whose occupants are involved in knowledge-based activities. Existing ontologies are reused for the representation of the building domain, while original concepts describing the worker, its activity and conditions are related to them with a linked data approach. Eventually, the proposed ontology capabilities are evaluated for a demonstrative use case. This work is the first contribution of an ongoing research which foresees further developments, including its implementation and validation in a real-world scenario.