An ontology to support flow system descriptions from design to operation of buildings

•The AEC industry needs a common language to describe flow systems.•The proposed ontology FSO supports describing mass and energy flows in systems.•Using linked data and semantic web technologies to describe a flow system.•Supported use cases span both design and operation of buildings.•A research roadmap points out paths for future developments building on FSO. The interoperability of information from design to operations is an acknowledged challenge in the fields of architecture, engineering and construction (AEC). As a potential solution to the interoperability issues, there has been increasing interest in how linked data and semantic web technologies can be used to establish an extendable data model. Semantic web ontologies have been developed for the AEC domain, but an ontology for describing the energy and mass flow between systems and components is missing. This study proposes the Flow Systems Ontology (FSO) for describing the composition of flow systems, and their mass and energy flows. Two example models are expressed using FSO vocabulary. SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language (SPARQL) queries are performed to further demonstrate and validate the ontology. The main contribution consists of developing FSO as an ontology complementary to the existing ontologies. Finally, the paper introduces a roadmap for future developments building on FSO.