The Generic Engine Interface (GEI) offers generic access to initial and boundary data stored in files of type BDF, netCDF and selafin. The meta data is not hardcoded but configured during runtime. It is generated by reading configuration files in the initialization phase. The main file contains at the moment about 1500 Quantities and refers to further configuration files. These define for each Quanity units, ElementTypes, ElementSets and their IDs. The ExchangeItems described below are a schematic one and typical examples for OutputExchangeItems. http://www.baw.de/vip/en/departments/department_k/publications/std/openmi/omi_baw-en.html Bundesanstalt fur Wasserbau Peter Schade Peter.Schade@BAW.DE dotNet 1.4.0.0 LinearConversion Buffering and temporal extrapolation schematic ExchangeItem: ID = ShortName + Kind + InternalBAWNumber; Kind: (Val)= scalar or (Vec)=vector The majority of ElementSets has Elements of type XYPoint. They cover 2D fields, are located along model boundaries, at single locations etc.. XYZPoint is used for sources and sinks of 3D models. The values of a certain location are stored once, but can be provided at several ElementSets: the same XYPoint values can be part of the overall values at "AllLocations" as well as of the subset "Location00001". example for open boundary data: waterlevel with Id WasserSt(Val)[00003] the ID AllLocations/xyPt[wl.bc.location_grid.dat(002)] stands for example for all vertices along a location grid example for data at the free surface: wind field varying in space and time with ID WindGe(Vec)[00906]; the (Vec) stands for vector data the ID AllVertices/xyPt[g05.Kanal.bin(002)] stands for all vertices of the referenced grid g05.Kanal.bin example for initial data in an area: sediment mass at the bottom with ID SedMass(Val)[01447] the ID AllVertices/xyPt[utr.dat] stands for all vertices of the referenced grid utr.dat example for source and sink data: discharge with Id EinVol(Val)[01058] the ID Location00001/xyzPt[lg.2x3D.grid.dat(015)] stands for all vertices in the watercolumn above the XY position at Location00001 in the referenced grid lg.2x3D.grid.dat The GEI is not a numerical model proceeding in time. The GEI has a database functionality, meaning that the values of all TimeStamps are known (from the beginning.