EMD-DF64: A 64-Bit File Format for Energy Monitoring and Disaggregation Datasets

There is a consensus in the Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring research community on the importance of public datasets in furthering load disaggregation research. Nevertheless, despite the considerable efforts to release public data, not many steps have been taken towards homogenizing how these are made available to the community and providing seamless access to the available and future datasets.In this paper, we present the Energy Monitoring and Disaggregation Data Format (EMD-DF64). EMD-DF64 is a data model, file format, and application programming interface developed to provide a unique interface to create, manage, and access electric energy datasets. The proposed format is an extension of the well-known Sony WAVE64 format that supports the storage of audio data and metadata annotations in the same file, thus reducing the number of artifacts that have to be maintained by the dataset users.