This web site makes the case for the provision of Quality Assurance systems online. The proposal is that reliable simulations that predict what reality might be in new building designs require roadmaps to:

1. good quality data on real building performance - to calibrate the simulations against
2. good quality data on the predictions of reality - the performance output - imagined by digital simulation programs - again to calibrate new simulations against.
3. input data whose provenance is guaranteed that describes the ebuilding models in simulation programs.
4. the state of the art in the process of preparing high quality input of building description and site description data for use in predicting building performance that is a trusted predicted of the likely reality.

The site builds upon the work of IEA Solar Heating and Cooling (IEA SHC) Programme Task 31 Daylight for the 21st Century. That work generated a Daylight Roadmap and svarious supporting documents including a suite of tests for Light Rendering Software (the latter In collaboration with the CIE). It is hoped to develop a 'consumer' guide to render software founded upon these tests.

The goal is to extend this daylight through the IEA SHC Working Group on Daylight, and to trial the idea in other spheres in which the digital craft of building performance simulation is used. The IEA work on BESTEST procedures for thermal simulation software may well also form the basis of another consumer guide.

The assumption upon which all this is based is that a simulation input document - whether a thermal property of a material, a weather file, or a whole input file for a digital simulation program contains not only the data used by the program but also the links or references to the places on the web where the document defitinion information can be found. A computer program interrogating this data should therefore be able to find:

• how to convert each term in the document it doesn’t understand into a term it does understand With the appropriate RDF’s an XML document describing lighting performance measurements in an office building in Los Angeles might be used to create a realistic Radiance daylight simulation for San Diego this week; and next week it might form the basis of a DOE2 analysis of the impact of daylight on cooling equipment energy use in a Los Angeles doctors’ surgery.
• the source laboratory for the measured data, the date of the test and the type of test equipment.. A first step in the definition of high quality simulation studies of building performance is Quality Assured inout data.
• examplar, self-documenting simulation files that can be used to provide assurance that the simulation performance predictions for a new building can be trusted.

The plan is to develop a web-based approach to Quality Assurance in building performance simulation. The most obvious advantage of this is the accessibility of the data. Instead of a single database of simulation data with a single structure which requires many years of negotiation to define, each time a person sets up a new Quality tested file or measures a new building, it can be put on the web as another “data point”. All that needs to be done “centrally’ is provide a means of finding the data.

If each dataset is placed in Cyber space with its own built-in RDF definitions, in an XML language document, then useful searches by a pre-processor could be constructed such as: “find all the mild climate office buildings monitored in the past 10 years for which lighting measurement and energy consumption figures are available” ’.The computing processes associated with this type of search is the subject of a recent Auckland University Computer Science Masters thesis. It has shown a prototype of how such a search mechanism might be added to the prototype SimQA web site www.aecsimqa.net that has resulted from this thesis proposal.

A similar search concentrating only on buildings for which energy use data is stored might be used by the energy performance simulation post processor to find information to calibrate its predictions. The simulation package authors do not need to have done a complete analysis of the knowledge representation required to construct a computer-based “‘product’ model of a building” and hence of the translation of their input data into that model format. Rather, they need to provide a link from the program user to the RDF for their program. Inference engines based on samantic web concepts will provide the link to relevant data in other people’s data formats.

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