Problem statement

Our team will develop a new exploratory data analysis tool for the Center for the Built Environment (CBE). CBE, a research group in the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley (http://www.cbe.berkeley.edu), works to inform the building industry about building technologies and design techniques. For the organization's Occupant Satisfaction Survey and Benchmarking Building Quality research project, a vast amount of data is collected via a web-based survey that measures occupant satisfaction using a variety of metrics (such as air quality, acoustics and lighting) in various buildings.

This survey data is of value to the various types of users who are administering the survey or are otherwise interested in the information it may provide. These user types include researchers, real estate managers and owners, designers and architects, electrical and mechanical engineers, and building operations managers. Currently, the rich data set residing in the survey database cannot be exploited in a meaningful way. We intend to create a software application that enables our intended users to dynamically explore the data in the survey database, in order to investigate hypotheses and observe trends in building occupant satisfaction with respect to various building technologies.