Distributed semantic repositories in smart grids

Smart grids and the semantic web are two recent paradigms that come hand in hand. On the one side, the evolution of current power networks demands dealing with big amounts of data that must be processed to gain valuable information. On the other, semantic web technologies that directly address this data enrichment and knowledge extraction. Further, smart grids will be formed of a galaxy of intelligent nodes controlling one or more network components; therefore, we propose a tree architecture inspired by the actual hierarchy of the power network and claim that, in this domain, regarding the tangled bunch of standard protocols, one global ontology based on the CIM (Common Information Model) suffices, since it may be extended, combined with other existing protocols, and divided into smaller, interoperable profiles stored in each node of the grid. To this end, we present a comparison among several local semantic knowledge repository solutions and cope with the query federation problem: how to retrieve and manipulate this distributed information. Finally, we illustrate this novel scenario with a real-world implementation.