Edward Corry

Linking building data in the cloud: Integrating cross-domain building data using linked data

Within the operational phase buildings are now producing more data than ever before, from energy usage, utility information, occupancy patterns, weather data, etc. In order to manage a building holistically it is important to use knowledge from across these information sources. However, many barriers exist to their interoperability and there is little interaction between these islands of information. As part of moving building data to the cloud there is a critical need to reflect on the design of cloud-based data services and how they are designed from an interoperability perspective. If new cloud data services are designed in the same manner as traditional building management systems they will suffer from the data interoperability problems. Linked data technology leverages the existing open protocols and W3C standards of the Web architecture for sharing structured data on the web. In this paper we propose the use of linked data as an enabling technology for cloud-based building data services. The objective of linking building data in the cloud is to create an integrated well-connected graph of relevant information for managing a building. This paper describes the fundamentals of the approach and demonstrates the concept within a Small Medium sized Enterprise (SME) with an owner-occupied office building.

Representing simmodel in the web ontology language

Many building energy performance (BEP) simulation tools, such as EnergyPlus and DOE-2, use custom schema definitions (IDD and BDL respectively) as opposed to standardised schema definitions (defined in XSD, EXPRESS, and so forth). A Simulation Domain Model (SimModel) was therefore proposed earlier, representative for a new interoperable XML-based data model for the building simulation domain. Its ontology aims at moving away from tool-specific, non-standard nomenclature by implementing an industry-validated terminology aligned with the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC). In this paper, we document our ongoing efforts to make building simulation data more interoperable with other building data. In order to be able to better integrate SimModel information with other building information, we have aimed at representing this information in the Resource Description Framework (RDF). A conversion service has been built that is able to parse the SimModel ontology in the form of XSD schemas and output a SimModel ontology in OWL. In this article, we document this effort and give an indication of what the resulting SimModel ontology in OWL can be used for.