Exploring energy performance certificates through visualization

Abstract

Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs) provide interesting information on the standard-based calculation of energy performance, thermo-physical and geometrical related properties of a building. Because of the volume of available data (issued as open data) and the heterogeneity of the attributes, the exploration of these energy-related data collections is challenging. This paper presents INDICE (INformative DynamiC dashboard Engine), a new data visualization framework able to automatically explore large collections of EPCs. INDICE explores EPCs through both querying and analytics tasks, and intuitively presents the output through informative dashboards. The latter include dynamic and interactive maps along with different informative charts allowing different stakeholders (e.g., domain and non-domain expert users) to explore and interpret the extracted knowledge at different spatial granularity levels. The objective of INDICE is to create energy maps useful for the characterization of the energy performance of buildings located in different areas. The experimental evaluation, performed on a real set of EPCs related to a major Italian region in the North West of Italy, demonstrates the effectiveness of INDICE in exploring an EPC dataset through different data and knowledge visualization techniques