Text2Onto-Agent: An llm agent-based end-to-end automated ontology construction method anda case study of green building domain modeling

He, J.; Chen, H.; Yang, H.; Li, P. and Zheng, Z. (2026) Text2Onto-Agent: An llm agent-based end-to-end automated ontology construction method anda case study of green building domain modeling. Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, 152(9): 04026153, ISSN 0733-9364

Abstract

Domain ontologies play a crucial role in organizing and integrating heterogeneous knowledge in the construction industry, particularly for the modeling and semantic representation of building codes and standards. Existing ontology construction approaches - including manual, semiautomatic, and automated methods - still rely heavily on domain experts, resulting in high development costs, subjective bias, and limited scalability. Recent large language model (LLM)-driven methods have shown promise for end-to-end ontology construction. However, their direct application to iterative ontology modeling remains challenging. LLM calls over long and dynamically evolving contexts often lead to degeneration and hallucination. Moreover, the inherent stochasticity of LLM outputs, together with the accumulation of structural errors across iterations, can progressively undermine the coherence and reliability of the constructed ontology. To address these challenges, we propose Text2Onto-Agent (T2OA), an agent-based, end-to-end ontology construction framework that formulates ontology modeling as a closed-loop reasoning process. T2OA enables an LLM-based agent to coordinate multiple diagnostic reasoning modules while interacting with a graph-based memory that persistently stores the evolving ontology. This memory provides structured and explicit contextual references across iterations, thereby reducing reliance on long-context prompts, mitigating output stochasticity, and supporting proactive error detection and correction during ontology evolution. A case study in the green building domain demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed framework. T2OA achieves an F1-score of 0.77 for concept disambiguation, as well as prediction accuracies of 85.22% and 90.35% for parent-child and sibling relations, respectively. Furthermore, T2OA significantly outperforms baseline methods in terms of ontology completeness, highlighting its potential for constructing reliable and domain-adaptive ontologies for building codes and standards. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/pipiyapi/T2OA.

Item Type: Article
Index terms: agent, effectiveness, building code, case study, large language model, coherence, modelling, ontology, evolution, bias, reasoning, accuracy, construction industry, construction method, module, green building
Subjects: industry analysis, architectural elements, regulatory law, cognitive psychology, environmental science, human factors and perception, probability and distributions, practitioner, analytical methods, professional development, design practice, education and knowledge transfer, data science, data collection methods, performance management, building construction
Topics: Roles and Professions, Site Management, Research Practice, Engineering Principles, Quality Management, Information Management, Legal Issues, Sustainability, Design Practice
Descriptive scope: 5 PCTEA

N.B. Descriptive scope is a count of how many of the five facets of empirical research are indicated by the words used in title, abstract and keywords. It is not intended as a judgement on the research; merely a count of the kind of word we would expect to indicate Phenomenon, Concepts, Theoretical framing, Empirical techniques, Analytical techniques. If all five are present, then a code of “5 PCTEA” will indicate this. If you feel the coding for this record is questionable, we welcome discussion around the terms we matched or the way we categorized them. The facet you would expect may not be coded, or a facet may be coded inappropriately. This can also bear on a larger question, of which facets should be treated as defining in construction management research. Please get in touch, and we will look at it. More details here