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Making SimModel information available as RDF graphs

2014-09-19, Pauwels, Pieter, Corry, Edward, O'Donnell, James

Many Building Energy Performance Simulation (BEPS) on tools use custom schema definitions as opposed to standardised schema definitions (defined in XSD, EXPRESS, and so forth).A Simulation Domain Model (SimModel) was therefore previously developed and is representative of a new interoperable XML-based data model for the building simulation domain. In this paper we document our ongoing efforts to make building simulation data more interoperable with other building data. In order to better integrate SimModel information with other building information, the authors propose to represent this information in the Resource Description Framework (RDF). A specialised conversion service parses the SimModel ontology, which is in the form of linked XSD schemata, and output a SimModel ontology in OWL. In this article, we further outline how the conversion service now also parses input SimModel XML files and outputs SimModel instances as RDF graphs. We briefly indicated how those SimModel RDF graphs can subsequently be used.

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A performance assessment ontology for the environmental and energy management of buildings

2015-09, Corry, Edward, Pauwels, Pieter, Hu, Shushan, Keane, Marcus, O'Donnell, James

Narrowing the performance deficit between design intent and the real-time environmental and energy performance of buildings is a complex and involved task, impacting on all building stakeholders. Buildings are designed, built and operated with increasingly complex technologies. Throughout their life-cycle, they produce vast quantities of data. However, many commercial buildings do not perform as originally intended. This paper presents a semantic web based approach to the performance gap problem, describing how heterogeneous building data sources can be transformed into semantically enriched information. A performance assessment ontology and performance framework (software tool) are introduced, which use this heterogeneous data as a service for a structured performance analysis. The demonstrator illustrates how heterogeneous data can be published semantically and then interpreted using a life-cycle performance framework approach.

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Publication

Representing SimModel in the Web Ontology Language

2014-06-25, Pauwels, Pieter, Corry, Edward, O'Donnell, James

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.