Toward semantic interoperability of energy using and producing appliances in residential environments

About two thirds of the energy consumed in buildings originates household appliances. Nowadays, appliances are often intelligent and networked devices that form complete energy consuming, producing, and managing systems. Reducing energy is therefore a matter of managing and optimizing the energy utilization on a system level. These systems need standardized interfaces on a sensor and device level to enable further extensions. Many of the required standards already exist, but a common architecture does not, resulting in a market which is too fragmented and powerless. We are therefore designing a reference ontology for these appliances, and in this paper we present our initial results. We have identified 48 different semantic assets that describe various properties of smart appliances in residential environments. After translating 19 of these assets into Web Ontology Language (OWL), we identified 20 recurring concepts that will be the initial building blocks of the reference ontology.