DABGEO: a Reusable and Usable Global Energy Ontology for the Energy Domain

Abstract

The heterogeneity of energy ontologies hinders the interoperability between ontology-based energymanagement applications to perform a large-scale energy management. Thus, there is the need fora global ontology that provides common vocabularies to represent the energy subdomains. A globalenergy ontology must provide a balance of reusability–usability to moderate the effort required toreuse it in different applications. This paper presents DABGEO: a reusable and usable global ontologyfor the energy domain that provides a common representation of energy domains represented byexisting energy ontologies. DABGEO can be reused by ontology engineers to develop ontologies forspecific energy management applications. In contrast to previous global energy ontologies, it followsa layered structure to provide a balance of reusability–usability. In this work, we provide an overviewof the structure of DABGEO and we explain how to reuse it in a particular application case. Inaddition, the paper includes an evaluation of DABGEO to demonstrate that it provides a balance ofreusability–usability.