Created in Close Interaction with the Industry: The Smart Appliances REFerence (SAREF) Ontology

Around two thirds of the energy consumed by buildings can be traced back to the residential sectors and thus household appliances. Today, most appliances are highly intelligent and networked devices, in principle being able to form complete energy consuming, producing, and managing systems. Reducing the use of energy has therefore become a matter of managing and optimizing the energy utilization at a system level. These systems are technically very heterogeneous, and standardized interfaces on a sensor and device level are therefore needed. Many of the required standards already exist, but a common architecture does not, resulting in a too fragmented and powerless market. To enable semantic interoperability for smart appliances we therefore developed SAREF, the Smart Appliance REFerence ontology. In this paper we present SAREF and describe our experience in creating this ontology in close interaction with the industry, pointing out the lessons learned and identifying topics for follow-up actions.