Ontology-driven development of web services to support district energy applications

摘要

AbstractCurrent urban and district energy management systems lack a common semantic referential for effectively interrelating intelligent sensing, data models and energy models with visualization, analysis and decision support tools. This paper describes the structure, as well as the rationale that led to this structure, of an ontology that captures the real-world concepts of a district energy system, such as a district heating and cooling system. This ontology (called ee-district ontology) is intended to support knowledge provision that can play the role of an intermediate layer between high-level energy management software applications and local monitoring and control software components. In order to achieve that goal, the authors propose to encapsulate queries to the ontology in a scalable web service, which will facilitate the development of interfaces for third-party applications. Considering the size of the ee-district ontology once populated with data from a specific district case study, this could prove to be a repetitive and time-consuming task for the software developer. This paper therefore assesses the feasibility of ontology-driven automation of web service development that is to be a core element in the deployment of heterogeneous district-wide energy management software.Highlights•The authors developed a methodology for the development of an ontology capturing the concepts of a district energy system.•An ontology of district energy systems has been implemented in OWL and instantiated for three real-world districts•The ontology supports district energy management software tools with regard to semantic knowledge and interoperability.•The ontology is hosted by a semantic repository and is linked via a web service generated using metaprogramming principles.