Integrating Heterogeneous Building and Periphery Data Models at the District Level: The NIM Approach
This addresses interoperability issues for participants like users, services, or sensors in smart district applications, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing meta-model and mapping techniques.
The paper tackled the problem of integrating heterogeneous data models for buildings, neighborhoods, and periphery devices at the district level by developing a Neighbourhood Information Model (NIM) using a meta-model approach, which enables runtime extension and integration via a mapping DSL and code generation.
Integrating existing heterogeneous data models for buildings, neighbourhoods and periphery devices into a common data model that can be used by all participants, such as users, services or sensors is a cumbersome task. Usually new extended standards emerge or ontologies are used to define mappings between concrete data models. Within the COOPERaTE project a neighbourhood information model (NIM) has been developed to address interoperability and allow for various kinds of data to be stored and exchanged. The implementation of the NIM follows a meta model based approach, allowing for runtime extension and for easily integrating heterogeneous data models via a mapping DSL and code generation of adaptation components.