  Smart and continuous commissioning (SCCx) of buildings can result in a
significant reduction in the gap between design and operational performance.
Ontologies play an important role in SCCx as they facilitate data readability
and reasoning by machines. A better understanding of ontologies is required in
order to develop and incorporate them in SCCx. This paper critically reviews
the state-of-the-art research on building data ontologies since 2014 within the
SCCx domain through sorting them based on building data types, general
approaches, and applications. The data types of two main domains of building
information modeling and building management system have been considered in the
majority of existing ontologies. Three main applications are evident from a
critical analysis of existing ontologies: (1) key performance indicator
calculation, (2) building performance improvement, and (3) fault detection and
diagnosis. The key gaps found in the literature review are a holistic ontology
for SCCx and insight on how such approaches should be evaluated. Based on these
findings, this study provides recommendations for future necessary research
including: identification of SCCx-related data types, assessment of ontology
performance, and creation of open-source approaches.
