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

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