Semantic Digital Thread Framework for Explainable Lifecycle Carbon Management: An Ontology-Driven and Auditable Automation Backbone

This paper presents a Semantic Digital Thread (SDT) framework for explainable and auditable lifecycle carbon management in built environments. The framework integrates ontology-driven automation with a five-layer semantic pipeline — spanning data ingestion, semantic modeling, reasoning, governance, and scene presentation — to enable traceable, automated operations and maintenance workflows. The proposed approach leverages W3C SSN/SOSA, Brick Schema, Neo4j, SHACL, and PROV-O to bridge heterogeneous facility data and management logic into executable, auditable actions.