DOI: 10.6078/d1f671
title: ASHRAE global database of thermal comfort field measurements

description: Recognizing the value of open-source research databases in advancing the
 art and science of HVAC, in 2014 the ASHRAE Global Thermal Comfort
 Database II project was launched under the leadership of University of
 California at Berkeley’s Center for the Built Environment and The
 University of Sydney’s Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) Laboratory. The
 ASHRAE Global Thermal Comfort Database II (as it is known) is intended to
 support diverse inquiries about thermal comfort in field settings. The
 exercise began with a systematic collection and harmonization of raw data
 from the last two decades of thermal comfort field studies around the
 world. The final database is comprised of field studies from around the
 world, with contributors releasing their raw data to the project for wider
 dissemination to the thermal comfort research community. After the
 quality-assurance process, there was a total of 77,304 rows of data of
 paired subjective comfort votes and objective instrumental measurements of
 thermal comfort parameters. An additional 25,288 rows of data from the
 original ASHRAE RP-884 database are included. The most recent update
 (version 2.1) has 6,441 new rows of data, bringing the total number of
 entries to 109,033. The project was partially performed within the
 framework of the International Energy Agency Energy in Buildings and
 Communities programm (IEA-EBC) Annex 69 "Strategy and Practice of
 Adaptive Thermal Comfort in Low Energy Buildings.
description: In order to
 ensure that the quality of the database would permit end-users to conduct
 robust hypothesis testing, the team built the data collection methodology
 on specific requirements, as follows: Data needed to come
 from field experiments rather than climate chamber research, so that it
 represented research conducted in “real” buildings occupied by “real”
 people doing their normal day-to-day activities, rather than paid college
 students sitting in a controlled indoor environment of a climate
 chamber. Both instrumental
 (indoor climatic) and subjective (questionnaire) data were required, such
 that they were recorded in the same space at the same time
 The database
 needed to be built up from the raw data files generated by the original
 researchers, instead of their processed or published findings.
 The raw data
 needed to come with a supporting codebook explaining the coding
 conventions used by the data contributor, to allow harmonization with the
 standardized data formatting within the database. Data must
 have been published either in a peer-reviewed journal or conference
 paper. All datasets
 from individual studies were subject to a
 stringent quality assurance process before being assimilated into the
 database. The research team conducted a final validation by first
 comparing each raw dataset with its related publication provided by the
 data contributor to prevent transmission errors.  Systematic quality
 control of each study was performed to ensure that records within the
 database were reasonable. Firstly, distributions of each variable were
 visualized to identify aberrant values. Then, cross-plots between two
 variables (e.g. thermal sensation and thermal comfort) were used to check
 for incorrectly coded data. Finally, a few rows from each study were
 randomly selected to verify consistency between the original dataset and
 the standardized database. Since the data came from multiple independent
 studies, every record did not necessarily include all of the thermal
 comfort variables. Where data were missing, that particular range of cells
 was filled with a null value.
description: The dataset
 is seperated into a `metadata` table and a `measurements table. The
 metadata table has high-level information at the building level and is
 provided as a .csv file. The measurement table contiains all field
 measurements and is provided as a compressed comma-separated value
 (.csv.gz) file using UTF-8 character encoding. The first row contains
 human-readable column headers. Each row represents an individual’s
 questionnaire responses, and the associated instrumental measurements,
 thermal index values and outdoor meteorological observations where
 available.   Full details can be found in the readme document.