Use of External Ontologies

The OEO re-uses other ontologies to support compatibility between different ontologies as well as to avoid "re-inventing the wheel". External ontologies can either be used in parallel to the OEO, get imported or be in the phase of discussion if and how we want to use them. An important role plays the BFO upper ontology that structures all our classes into a bigger world view. External ontologies that also use BFO can be imported as-is. All others have to be looked at to decide which superclasses of the BFO are the best fit for the classes that get imported.

Imported Ontologies

• Information Artifact Ontology (IAO): This ontology provides classes to describe information artefacts as well as useful annotation properties. It does not use BFO and got classified by us as generically dependent continuant classes. It gets imported through the IAO-module.
• Relationship Ontology (RO): This ontology provides useful annotations. A subset of it got imported into the OEO though the RO-module.
• Unit Ontology (UO): This ontology describes units. It does not use the BFO so we decided to classify the unit class and it's subclasses as generically dependent continuants. It gets imported through the UO-module.
• OBO Metadata Ontology (OMO): An ontology that incorporates the metadata (e.g. annotation property types) that was previously included in the IAO. It gets imported directly and not through a module.

Ontologies Used in Parallel

• GAZ: This ontology provides a lot of geographic locations like different states, federal states and regions. It is a large ontology and doesn't use BFO. Because of it's size we decided to not import this ontology, but use it as another namespace when using the OEO, if the classes of GAZ are needed.

Ontologies in Discussion

• Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO): This ontology provides an extensive amount of classes to describe economic terms. It does not use the BFO and has more terms than we need, so we are currently working on creating an excel sheet with the needed classes, definitions and potential OEO superclasses (see issue #476).
• Environment Ontology (ENVO): EnvO is a community ontology for the concise, controlled description of environments.
• Modern Science Ontology (ModSci): This ontology describes the modern sciences and related terms. It does not implement BFO and is currently discussed (#194).
• enArgus Ontology: This ontology defines terms about the energy domain in German language. It can be used as a knowledge source as it is close to our domain, but not imported because it is protected and in German.
• Ontology for Dataset Quality Information (daQ): This ontology describes quality criteria for datasets. The issue (#16) got closed until someone has a relevant use case where this ontology would be of help.
• Phenotype And Trait Ontology (PATO): An ontology of phenotypic qualities (properties, attributes or characteristics)
• Smart Applications REFerence ontology (SAREF):
• Ontology for Energy Management Applications (OEMA):
• EnergyCIM:

Other Ontologies

• Urban Energy Ontology: SEMANCO Energy Model (Link no longer available) comprising concepts captured from diverse sources including standards, use cases and activity descriptions and data sources related to the domains of urban planning and energy management. In particular it contains the terms and attributes that describe regions, cities, neighbourhoods and buildings; energy consumption and CO2 emission indicators, as well as climate and socio- economic factors that influence energy consumption. The ontology enables semantic tools to access the data stemming from different domains and applications. [discontinued]
• Renewable Energy Ontology: In this paper, we argued that using ontologies may form a useful tool to find the best renewable energy provider. The contribution of this paper is to develop ontology concepts for measuring such "goodness". Common and frequent concepts from five popular and trusted online renewable energy providers were extracted, refined, and then checked against nine other online providers. 10.1109/IT-DREPS.2013.6588171 [discontinued]
• Energy resource ontology Institute of Computer Engineering TU Wien
• OntoWind: An Improved and Extended Wind Energy Ontology In this paper, we present an improved and extended version of a wind energy ontology previously proposed.
• Ontological Description of Meteorological and Climate Data Collections Conference: International Conference "Data Anallytics and Management in Data Intensive Domains " DAMDID/RCDL'201
• Wirtschaftszweige (NACE); The WZ Ontology: Good identifiers for product types based on WZ; http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/ontologies/pcs2owl/wz/O_wz.html
• SEAS Ontology https://ci.mines-stetienne.fr/seas/index.html Including: ArchitectureOntology-2.0, BatteryOntology-1.0 , BooleanPropertyOntology-1.0 , BuildingOntology-1.0 , CityOntology-1.0 , ComfortOntology-1.0 , CommunicationOntology-1.0 , ComplexOntology-1.0 , DeviceOntology-1.1 , ElectricLightSourceOntology-1.0 , ElectricPowerSystemOntology-1.0 , ElectricVehicleOntology-1.0 , EnergyFormOntology-1.0 , EvaluationOntology-1.0 , FailableSystemOntology-1.0 , FeatureOfInterestOntology-1.0 , FlexibilityOntology-1.0 , ForecastingOntology-1.1 , GenericPropertyOntology-1.0 , GreenKPIOntology-1.0 , OfferingOntology-1.1 , OperatingOntology-1.0 , OptimizationOntology-1.1 , PeriodicSignalOntology-1.0 , PhotovoltaicOntology-1.0 , PlayerOntology-1.1 , PricingOntology-1.0 , SmartMeterOntology-1.1 , StatisticsOntology-1.0 , StreetLightSystemOntology-1.0 , SystemOntology-1.1 , ThermodynamicSystemOntology-1.0 , TimeOntology-1.0 , TradingOntology-1.1 , ZoneLightingOntology-1.0 , ZoneOntology-1.0
• Electricity Market Ontology (EMO): http://www.mascem.gecad.isep.ipp.pt/ontologies/
• OntoPowSys: A Domain Ontology for Power Systems: A link to a publication is here