The Unison project partners, like other offshore wind project developers, need geospatial data to plan, construct, operate and eventually decommission wind farms safely and effectively. The proliferation of projects, and thus data users, has led to a common challenge for both developers and contractors in the industry: a lack of data standardisation and exchange. Over the last year, the Carbon Trust, together with the Unison project partners, Technical Review Group and other contributing stakeholders, have developed a standardised open-source data model for the offshore wind farm construction stage.

The Offshore Wind Data Model for construction (OWDM-construction) is a software-agnostic, open-source template. It represents a de facto industry standard for structuring and exchanging data during the construction phase of fixed-bottom offshore wind development. It directly addresses the lack of standardisation in managing, analysing and visualising geospatial data during offshore wind project development. This model was built, tested and refined by the technical experts who regularly work with geospatial data and have faced the challenges relating to data management, integration and exchange, often driving up project costs and increasing risks.

The OWDM-construction establishes a starting-point for geospatial data exchange that increases efficiency, facilitates interoperability between data users, and improves quality control, and therefore lowers the cost of development.

In September 2026, the Project Steering Committee (PSC) governing the Unison project approved the public release of the OWDM-construction, together with supporting documentation including:

• The OWDM-construction template available in open-source format (.xml) and various other formats including Excel (.xls), Geodatabase (.gdb) and GeoPackage (.gpkg). These can be accessed and downloaded in the zip file below.
• A technical guidance document, which provides guidance on the purpose, scope, design principles, standards, and data architecture of the OWDM-construction. It is recommended to be used as a reference for understanding the technical requirements and application of the model.
• A data dictionary intended to provide detailed field-level and domain-level definitions required to implement and populate the model consistently.

Offshore Wind Data Model (OWDM) Construction (.zip)

Technical Guidance Document (.pdf)

Data Dictionary (.pdf)