OPTEEMAL D2.5: Report on standardised information exchange protocols

The goal of the OptEEmAL platform is to provide support to users in the optimisation of energy efficient refurbishment building designs on a district level. For this purpose, the platform integrates different modules and components to facilitate interoperability between different data sources with information related to the development of the projects (BIM and GIS models, weather, social, economic, etc.) necessary to perform the simulations (e.g., building energy simulations), and a corresponding set of tools (EnergyPlus, Nest, CitySim and others that may be needed in the future). One of the modules responsible to provide this interoperability is the Data Management Module (DMM). The data from different input sources are integrated in this module in order to generate the District Data Model (DDM), a data model that includes information of buildings at district level. The module also provides the mechanisms to extract the information required to perform different building simulations in order to reach the most optimal design solution as possible. This document summarizes the results obtained in Task 2.4 “Data repository prototype deployment and validation” whose purpose is the implementation of the methodologies and exchange protocols needed to build the District Data Model and the generation of links between the different data models (input data models, semantic data models, simulation data models, simulation models/simulation file formats) using Semantic Web technologies. The mechanisms to provide communication between repositories and the modules, and between the modules directly, include connectors and the corresponding interfaces as well as the technologies necessary to build the communication layer upon them. While these communication mechanisms and protocols have been developed to provide interoperability in some of the data exchange scenarios, their implementation is still ongoing in those which are subject and limited by the issues regarding to the current development of modules. The details on their final implementation will be reported on the next deliverable. This document also includes a description of the requirements collection and issues that have had to be dealt in the implementation of the software components necessary to provide the data integration in the Data Management Module. Problems and solutions in their implementation to generate the simulation data models which are accessed through different queries designed to extract the necessary data, depending on the simulation tool, are documented through several examples.