Enhancing energy management at district and building levels via an EM-KPI ontology

The use of information and communication technologies facilitates energy management (EM) at both district and building levels, but also generates a considerable amount of data. To gain insights into such data, it is essential to resolve the cross-domain data interoperability problem and determine an approach to exchange performance information and insightful data among various stakeholders. This paper developed an EM-KPI (key performance indicator) ontology to exchange key performance information and data for districts and buildings. The ontology contains two components: namely KPIs and EM master data; these, respectively, represent the multi-level performance information for energy performance tracking and the key data for data exploitation. Through a demonstration, a sample linked dataset generated using the data correlation predefined in the ontology is presented. The linked data analysis proves the feasibility of the ontology for exchanging data among different stakeholders and for exploring insights in relation to performance improvement.