A key challenge for home/building automation applications, especially energy management, is to enable the indirect integration of legacy home/building appliances and building components that do not have a network connection to the home/building network, to make it possible to monitor and partially control them. We propose a mechanism and system for the iterative identification and self-configuration of these devices through a shared backplane of networked sensors and actuators available in the building. This makes it possible to integrate these devices and interface them through a software proxy as if they were state of the art networked devices, thus extending the range of the network and the associated middleware towards all kinds of physical entities of that make up the home/building. These entities are supposed to be described in a model repository and a domain-specific ontology. The matching of the entities being discovered in the home/building environment to these known models is done by analog pattern matching, instead of requiring an exact match as would be the case with a standard digital networks protocol, so that it lends itself to iterative approximation. The architecture and OSGi-based implementation of this system are described. Examples are provided for typical home appliances and other subsystems of the home/building that may be dealt with in a similar way.