PowerOnt ontology

URL

http://elite.polito.it/ontologies/poweront/poweront.html

http://elite.polito.it/ontologies/dogont/dogont.html

Description

The PowerOnt ontology provides energy consumption information for different appliances in the house using the underlying DogOnt ontology, which models the domotic system of a house supporting intelligent operations. The DogOnt ontology consists of the following main classes: BuildingThing, which models available things, either controllable or not; BuildingEnvironment, which models the place where things are located; State, which models the stable configurations that controllable things can assume; Functionality, which models what controllable things can do; and Command, which models the way a given device property can be modified (e.g., light intensity) and the values it can assume.

The BuildingEnvironment class supports a coarse representation of domestic environments, as whole architectural units, including several types of Room, the Garage and the Garden. The BuildingThing concept represents all the elements that can be located or that can take part in the definition of a BuildingEnvironment. DogOnt defines a clear separation between objects that can be controlled by a domotic system (Controllable class) and all the other objects that can be found in a home (UnControllable class). Controllable objects can be appliances (Appliance class) or can belong to house plants such as the HVAC3 plant. Appliances and are further subdivided in WhiteGoods and BrownGoods, according to the EHS taxonomy. House plants include HVACSystems, ElectricSystems and SecuritySystems. Uncontrollable objects are all the home components that cannot be directly controlled by a domotic system. They are mainly subdivided in Furniture and Architectural elements. Furniture models all the elements usually adopted as furniture like chairs, cupboards, desks. Architectural elements model all the elements that define a living environment such as Walls and Floors. All the objects that are usually referred to as “device”, in the DogOnt ontology are objects belonging to the Controllable class. Each device class is associated to a set of different functionality, by means of the hasFunctionality relationship. Each functionality defines the Commands to modify a given device property (e.g., light intensity) and the values they can assume. Functionality is divided in different classes on the basis of their goals: ControlFunctionality models the ability to control a device or a part of it. NotificationFunctionality represents the ability of a device to autonomously advertise its internal state and in particular the ability of detecting and signalling state changes. QueryFunctionality encompasses the capabilities of a device to be queried, or polled, about its condition, e.g., failure and internal state values. States are classified according to the kind of values they can assume: continuously changing qualities are modelled as ContinuousStates, while qualities that can only assume discrete values (e.g., On/Off, Up/Down, etc.) are classified as DiscreteStates.

The PowerOnt ontology adds the PowerConsumption class, which encodes the power consumed by the appliances defined in DogOnt in a given state (StateValue class).

Observations

• We did not create the DogOnt and PowerOnt ontologies in the context of the Smart Appliances project. We are reusing the description of the ontology in: Dario Bonino, Fulvio Corno, 'DogOnt - Ontology Modeling for Intelligent Domotic Environments'. In: 7th International Semantic Web Conference. October 26-30, 2008. Ed. Springer-Verlag, Lecture Notes on Computer Science, pp. 790-803.
  • We provide above the official URL of the Politecnico di Torino where the DogOnt and PowerOnt ontologies are published.