Interoperability of Geothermal Data Models

Abstract

It is common practice, that professionals use specialised software tools for their domains. In many cases scientific and/or industrial societies have accepted standards, often based on XML, in order to ease interoperability between software tools.

The car industry has been the protagonist for a product data model called STEP for the description of mechanical parts. For architects and the building industry the International Alliance for Interoperability (IAI) defined the building in¬formation model IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) based on STEP. On the urban level, which for instance will be in the focus while designing district heating systems, CityGML became a standard of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC).

There are a lot of other standards like WITSML for the drill¬ers, SEGY developed by the Society of Exploration Geo¬physicists for storing geophysical data or GeoSciML which can be used to transfer information about geology.

All the geothermal aspects are too comprehensive for one semantic data model. Therefore applications are necessary to combine different semantic models without losing informa¬tion. The paper presents an approach to integrate different kinds of spatial data which can be stored on local sources or can be accessed by web services. Data sources are for exam¬ple city models, maps, urban planning data and geological data. Interrelations between the different models are set up by semantic and/or by the geospatial attributes.