From Data Sources to Data Access: Core Components of an Energy Data Platform Ecosystem

abstract

The increasing decentralization and sector coupling of energy systems have led to a rapid growth of heterogeneous, distributed datasets spanning geospatial, infrastructure, and socio-economic domains. Despite their availability, these data remain fragmented across institutional and technical boundaries, making discovery, access, and integration a major bottleneck in energy planning workflows. This poster presents the implementation of a standards-based data access and orchestration framework within the NEED (New data for the energy transition) platform ecosystem, combining (i) standardized data access through OGC API-compliant interfaces, (ii) a semantic metadata layer for structured discovery, and (iii) a query-driven orchestration mechanism. Data source owners register their sources through a dedicated registration component that stores a knowledge graph of interface descriptions and spatial coverage in an RDF4J triplestore, without ingesting raw data. End users browse this catalog through a Query UI and trigger an orchestrator that retrieves, transforms, and selectively materializes only the requested data subset on demand, following a data-virtualization-inspired paradigm. We validate the approach on a real-world case study exposing Bavarian LoD2 CityGML building data through OGC API – Features, showing that the architecture supports scalable, interoperable, and sovereign access to distributed energy-relevant data without full centralization.