Wasted Energy? Illuminating Energy Data With Ontologies

Using pervasive computing to reduce energy demand of complex commercial premises is extremely challenging in practice. Yet, this is exactly what is needed to help organizations address climate and decarbonization targets. Complex and heterogenous data, changing policy and practice, evolving infrastructures and estates, multiple stakeholders, and transient and persistent faults hidden in longitudinal data from thousands of sensors, are just some of the challenges to overcome. In our multiyear experience of working to create software systems to help find energy savings and enable effective policy creation, we have found an important gap that complicates our efforts: missing business context. In this article, we contribute our key lessons learned so far; categorizing the different types of information missing that need to be captured; and describe how linking this sea of information meaningfully is one of the most important, yet most complicated endeavors in energy management. We offer ontologies as a way to bridge stakeholder domains, and offer unique opportunities for organizations and researchers in pervasive sustainability and beyond to create better tools for enabling improved practice and operation in smart energy management.