Making SimModel information available as RDF graphs

Many building energy performance Simulation (BEPS) 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.