Leveraging knowledge graph for UK environmental legislation related to building construction and maintenance

Abstract

Carbon footprint generated by built environment is one of the biggest concerns in UK. Relevant legislations, act and guidelines for building design, construction and maintenance that interests environmental aspects are created and curated by many authorities from Government in UK. Stakeholders often find it difficult to access these legal and regulatory information across different jurisdiction since there is no common platform. This research proposes a framework for developing a domain-neutral platform where heterogeneous data will be highly interlinked in machine readable fashion paving further opportunities such as making general queries on, training statistical models for decision making and so on. Our proposed methodology uses domain ontologies and further applied in the development of a proof of concept system, called Knowledge Graph for UK Environmental Legislations related to Building Construction and Maintenance (UKENV-KG). UKENV-KG enables legislations and guidelines to be properly annotated through use of W3C-based semantic technologies. The report presents the methodology, the system architecture of proposed framework with implementation. A discussion on further possibilities is made at very end of the thesis.