An ontological assessment proposal for architectural outputs of generative adversarial network

Purpose This study presents an ontological approach to assess the architectural outputs of generative adversarial networks. This paper aims to assess the performance of the generative adversarial network in representing building knowledge. Design/methodology/approach The proposed ontological assessment consists of five steps. These are, respectively, creating an architectural data set, developing ontology for the architectural data set, training the You Only Look Once object detection with labels within the proposed ontology, training the StyleGAN algorithm with the images in the data set and finally, detecting the ontological labels and calculating the ontological relations of StyleGAN-generated pixel-based architectural images. The authors propose and calculate ontological identity and ontological inclusion metrics to assess the StyleGAN-generated ontological labels. This study uses 300 bay window images as an architectural data set for the ontological assessment experiments. Findings The ontological assessment provides semantic-based queries on StyleGAN-generated architectural images by checking the validity of the building knowledge representation. Moreover, this ontological validity reveals the building element label-specific failure and success rates simultaneously. Originality/value This study contributes to the assessment process of the generative adversarial networks through ontological validity checks rather than only conducting pixel-based similarity checks; semantic-based queries can introduce the GAN-generated, pixel-based building elements into the architecture, engineering and construction industry.