Ontology for representing building users' activities in space-use analysis

In spite of advances in formalizing space-use analysis (SUA) methods, which predict space utilization of buildings based on user activities and spaces, a detailed ontology that provides architects with a common vocabulary to represent their information about user activities is still lacking. The authors created an ontology that can be used in a formalized SUA method by extending combined existing theories on representing user or construction activities. This ontology allows architects to represent a user activity in a <User>, an <Action>, and two <Spatial requirement> instances. It also allows a computer to distinguish between 288 different space-use types that affect SUA and treat them differently. This paper contributes to the field of performance-based building design by offering a means of expressing user activities in a computer-interpretable form and using them in SUA, which informs about space utilization (a performance criterion) of a design option.