Devmane, Suhas, Rana, Omer  ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3597-2646 and Perera, Charith ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0190-3346
2026.
OntoSage: Intelligent human-building smartbot for semantic smart building question answering.
World Wide Web
29
, 17.
10.1007/s11280-026-01403-0
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Abstract
Smart buildings remain heterogeneous across sensing infrastructure, metadata quality, legacy protocols, and analytics requirements, hindering reusable human–building natural language interfaces. We present OntoSage, a modular framework for ontologically grounded question answering (QA) and fulfillment of analytic intents over smart building data. The framework (i) leverages Brick Schema-based RDF model with reasoning capabilities, (ii) translates natural language (NL) questions into executable SPARQL via a fine-tuned seq2seq model (T5-Base), and (iii) orchestrates portable analytics microservices that operate on time-series sensor data referenced through ontology-linked UUIDs. A summarization component (open-weights Mistral-7B, zero-shot) converts structured SPARQL/SQL/analytic outputs into concise stakeholder-aware responses without requiring task-specific fine-tuning. We categorize QA complexity into four reasoning classes and report component-level execution metrics supporting these categories. To address portability, we formalize a lightweight adaptation workflow (ontology ingestion→entity enrichment for NLU→NL2SPARQL validity checks→analytics binding) designed to minimize per-building retraining. Reproducibility is enabled through public source code, synthetic and ontology-derived datasets, Docker/Compose service descriptors, and documented supporting scripts∗. The developers’ documentation is publicly accessible†.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Date Type: | Published Online |
| Status: | Published |
| Schools: | Schools > Computer Science & Informatics |
| Subjects: | Q Science > Q Science (General) Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA76 Computer software T Technology > TH Building construction |
| Publisher: | Springer Verlag (Germany) |
| ISSN: | 1386-145X |
| Date of First Compliant Deposit: | 8 January 2026 |
| Date of Acceptance: | 6 January 2026 |
| Last Modified: | 22 Jan 2026 12:14 |
| URI: | https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/183621 |
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