Digital Humanism in Smart Built Environments through SOLID Data Spaces

Abstract

The built environment significantly influences people's health, comfort, and productivity. With the rise of IoT and the integration of AI solutions in smart environments, buildings have evolved into complex ecosystems, interacting with inhabitants and surrounding systems. Two challenges arise: a knowledge gap in understanding inhabitant behavior's impact on building systems and the need to address privacy concerns in AI-enabled environments. This research aims to explore these challenges through the lens of digital humanism, focusing on creating semantically enabled data spaces in smart built environments. To this end, we propose LIGO Framework based on Solid specifications to model occupants' behavior, ensure data ownership, control and privacy as well as enhance communication between inhabitants and building services.

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CEUR ceur-ws.org

1. Introduction

’privacy paradox’ and compensating for the privacy risks with the convenience ofered by smart environments [ 2 ]. In other words, the benefits of customization and services ofered by smart environments are weighed against consideration of digital humanism perspective [ 3 ], which strives to embed values such as human dignity, freedom, and autonomy in the digital domains. As such, balancing the benefits of data-driven insights with the protection of individual privacy is crucial for fostering trust and ethical use of technology in smart environments.

In this context, we argue in the present contribution that, to efectively harness the potential of smart building systems, fundamental issues related to information access, privacy concerns, and data security must be addressed both conceptually and technically. In our work, we put forward the idea of an innovative computational application, which we shall refer to as LIGO (after the Latin expression for to tie, to bind, to interlink). LIGO is conceived to facilitate the negotiation between data spaces representing building occupants on the one side and data spaces representing Smart Building Systems (SBS) on the other side, whereby digital humanism principles (predominantly privacy and information integrity of the building occupants) are to be considered and built-in. The proposed framework sets out ambitious goals, including: • Bridging the digital gap in modeling occupants’ presence, perception, and behavior in buildings while accounting for and accommodating their vital data sharing and privacy requirements. • Bridging the communication and interoperability gaps between building information models and AI-enabled services by incorporating provenance and compliance verification mechanisms for inhabitants. • Enabling the occupants to actively, selectively, and dynamically filter the flow of information from their data space to that of the smart building systems. • Enabling the SBS data space to provide the users with timely, efective, and intuitively understandable information about the building, its operational status, the degrees of freedom for control actions, and general orientation.

To realize these goals and address the technical challenges, we aim to leverage the Solid framework, a decentralized web platform built on top of existing RDF standard1, where users can store their data in Solid Pods (Personal Online Data Stores) and provide them with greater control over who can access and use their information [ 4 ]. In our LIGO framework, Solid serves as a communication channel that facilitates data exchange between the built environment and its occupants while ensuring data ownership, control, and privacy. Furthermore, we provide an ontological foundation for the proposed framework, along with a preliminary technical specification of the elements required for its implementation.

2. Digital Humanism

Digital technologies have a profound impact on every aspect of our modern life, from social interactions and work environments to political systems and cultural norms. While the advent of digitalization ofers unique opportunities, it also triggers significant concerns regarding 1https://www.w3.org/2011/rdf-wg/wiki/Main_Page fundamental aspects of human existence, including dignity, autonomy, and privacy. In response to these challenges, Digital Humanism has emerged as a guiding vision, ofering an alternative to technology-driven approaches to digitalization. Its overarching aim is to address various concerns and side efects that arise in the wake of disruptive digital processes. Originating in Vienna, Digital Humanism finds its roots in the collaborative eforts of researchers from diverse fields, spanning social sciences, humanities, and computer science. The result of these collaborative eforts was the publication of the well-known position paper, the ”Vienna Manifesto on Digital Humanism,” [ 5 ] which has garnered widespread recognition and support. The manifesto underscores the importance of prioritizing human values and well-being amidst the relentless march of technological advancement. Central to the principles of digital humanism is the idea that technology should empower individuals, foster inclusivity, and promote social justice. It emphasizes the importance of considering the diverse needs and perspectives of people from all walks of life, ensuring that technological solutions are accessible, equitable, and respectful of human rights [ 3 ].

3. Proposed Framework

Our proposed LIGO framework consists of several core semantically enabled data spaces, namely the Personal Data Spaces (PDS), the Building Data Spaces (BDS), and the External Data Spaces (EDS) as depicted in Fig. 1.

With regard to the configuration and operational aspects of smart buildings, theoretical foundations and technical knowledge in mechanical, structural, and electrical engineering domains are well established. Starting of from these, Building Information Modelling (BIM) [ 6 ] approaches provide the core ontological framework for creating the building data spaces. Matters are somewhat more complex in the case of the necessary theoretical and ontological conditions for creating and operationalizing data spaces related to building users (occupants). There are a number of behavioural theories relevant to occupants’ perception of and actions in built environments [ 7 ], but the translation of those into the building operation domain has not been suficiently accomplished [ 8]. In order to realize the LIGO vision, our data space ontology will reuse the occupant-centric theory of building control systems and occupant behavior and the derivative OTTO ontology [9].

The LIGO framework serves as a mediator between user-side data spaces (representing individual building users) and SBS-side data spaces (representing building situation and condition). As depicted in Fig. 2, the main components of LIGO frameworks are as follows: (i) The Personal Data Space (PDS) component pertains to individuals’ data and encompasses basic user information, including individual attributes, needs, capabilities, and preferences (e.g., comfort and auditory preferences). Within the LIGO framework, PDS will leverage Solid Storage2 that provide ’access control’ mechanism, allowing for the selective granting of permissions to share data with the SBS.

(ii) The Building Data Space (BDS) component pertains to information related to general building information and services (e.g., building systems, building properties, etc.). Similar to PDS, we will leverage Solid server to manage building-related data and provide fine-grained access control and selective sharing of building data with relevant stakeholders.

(iii) The External Data Space (EDS) component represents relevant external information (e.g. weather conditions, social interaction, climate information, etc.). This component will also be implemented using Solid Storage to aggregate and manage external data sources in a decentralized manner. 2https://solidproject.org/TR/protocol#storage

(iv) The Smart Building System (SBS) component leverages the digital humanism model embedded within LIGO data spaces, enhancing contextual awareness in building processes and facilitating tailored service recommendations. This component is realized as Solid-based application server that performs read and write operations on top of diferent Solid Storages from PDS, BDS and EDS.

(v) The SBS User Interface (SBS-UI) component serves as an “end-user app” that enables users to seamlessly interact with SBS and share their personal data. It communicates with the SBS server through a Web API and provides control over the use of the SBS system.

4. Outlook

The key motivating factor behind the present contribution was the perception of a critical gap between: i) the increasing potential of Big Data, AI, IoT, and cloud computing to facilitate the creation and operation of smart built environments on the one side, and ii) the reservations toward fully embracing such technologies due to digital humanism concerns (privacy, security, freedom of choice, and dignity) formulated, among other places, in the digital humanism manifesto. In this paper, we provided an overview of an ongoing development to facilitate user-controlled, safe, and secure communication between building occupants and smart building systems. Ongoing eforts aim at implementing the related concept of the LIGO framework based on the Solid concepts and making it fully operational, and testing it for consistency, stability, robustness, and user experience. [8] T. Hong, S. D’Oca, W. J. Turner, S. C. Taylor-Lange, An ontology to represent energy-related occupant behavior in buildings. part i: Introduction to the dnas framework, Building and Environment 92 (2015) 764–777. [9] A. Mahdavi, D. Wolosiuk, C. Berger, Toward a theory-driven ontological framework for the representation of inhabitants in building performance computing, Journal of Building Engineering 73 (2023) 106804.

References

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