Blog: Ontologies in the context of the Green and Digital Transition

At the IoT Week 2022, the Semantic Interoperability Expert Group of the AIOTI WG Standardization organized a workshop on “Ontologies in the context of the Green and Digital Transition”. The chair was Laura Daniele (TNO) and the speakers were Martin Bauer (NEC Laboratories Europe), Svetoslav Mihaylov (European Commission), Gjalt Loots (TNO), Dave Raggett (ERCIM), Alberto Abella (FIWARE Foundation), Raúl Garcia Castro (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid), Aitor Corchero (Eurecat), Enrico Scarrone (Telecom Italia).

The session started with an introduction to the Green and Digital transformation by the EC. It then provided an update about the activities in the AIOTI semantic expert group concerning ontologies (especially the Ontology landscape recently published). The core of the session was about discussing the role of ontologies in the context of the Green and Digital transformation with external stakeholders. In the following, a few takeaways from the session are provided:

• European projects, especially in the energy and building domains, are already deploying ontology-based solutions for interoperability at high maturity level and on a large scale (e.g., InterConnect, Delta, AURORAL, OntoCommons, BIMEER and more).
• The value of semantics and ontologies is well understood, also by industry, however semantic technology is still too challenging and represents a paradigm shift for traditional software developers.
• Project partners always rely on a few semantic experts and there is a lack of tools and training material for fast adoption of the technology
  • It is crucial to improve on usability of large knowledge graphs and ontologies
  • Use cases to drive the development/extension of existing ontologies and common data models are needed
• It is unclear for stakeholders how to standardize new ontology contributions (e.g., to SAREF in ETSI).
• The standardization process is often perceived as taking too long by industrial partners: There is a call for agile standardization to keep up with fast changing market.
• From a standardization perspective, standardization can be done quickly with clear requirements from industry (e.g., SAREF4LIFT ontology created and published as an ETSI Technical Specification in 7 months).

• The water sector is as good example of agile standardization using smart data models (JSON-LD) in combination with extension of standardized ontologies such as SAREF4WATER.

The slides of the session can be downloaded here.