Ontology Integration for Building Systems and Energy Storage Systems

A building ontology defines the concepts and organization of building data. Such knowledge can be assistance with automatic data access and support data-driven applications in buildings. With technological advances in batteries and energy storage, an increasing number of data-driven building applications now involve both building systems and energy storage systems (ESS), e.g., peak load shaving (PLS). However, existing building ontologies, e.g., Brick, are not designed to include concepts from ESS systems. Given the emergence of building-ESS applications, it has become important to develop ontologies that can cover knowledge about both building and ESS systems. Building systems and ESS systems fall under different industry sectors and there are building ontologies and ESS ontologies that have been developed independently. To maximally reuse existing knowledge, we leverage ontology integration technologies. We present a building-energy storage ontology integration (BESOI) system that can extend a building ontology with appropriate ESS ontologies. Our system handles ambiguity, incoherence, and redundancy problems in ontology integration. We evaluate BESOI on four building-ESS applications by extending Brick, a notable building ontology, with different ESS ontologies. The results show that BESOI can extend the coverage of Brick from 68.09% to 95.74% on the concepts of applications.