Semantic visualization for smart spaces: Merging the material and digital worlds: Dissertation

The trend towards a more sensitive, adaptive, and responsive built environment has led to the concept of smart spaces. A smart space can be viewed as a physical environment in which smart objects collaboratively and continuously monitor the environment, interact with users, and adapt their behaviour according to information gathered from the physical environment and cyberspace. The development and management of smart spaces requires not only considering the entire life-cycle and physical structures of the built environment, but also understanding the collaboration and interdependencies between devices, services, and stakeholders. As a result of this diversity, efficient smart space life-cycle management requires the involvement of multidisciplinary teams of professionals that bring knowledge from their specific fields of expertise. As multidisciplinary teams are increasingly being implemented in the development and management of smart spaces, the actual work is more often globally organized, which promotes geographically dispersed teams. However, the utilization of geographically dispersed, virtual teams often creates a sort of collaboration paradox. While organizations need to have a proper level of diversity to ensure a high level of creativity and innovation, more distance factors affect the overall collaboration performance. The main results of this dissertation are software artefacts that aim to support the development and management of smart spaces. By anchoring illustrative visual representations into formal semantic data representations, the artefacts enable addressing some of the challenges related to multidisciplinary collaboration work. The utilization of appropriate visualization techniques and ontology representations enables different processes related to smart space development and management to become more understandable, which reduces, for example, the knowledge and communication gaps between collaboration stakeholders.