Study on Semantic Assets for Smart Appliances Interoperability : D-S2: SECOND INTERIM REPORT

About two thirds of the energy consumed by buildings originates from the residential sectors and thus household appliances. Household appliances or home appliances are electrical/mechanical machines which accomplish some household functions. Nowadays, appliances are not stand-alone systems anymore. They are often highly intelligent (“smart”) and networked devices, that form complete energy consuming, producing, and managing systems. Reducing the use of energy and production of greenhouse gasses is therefore not only a matter of increasing the efficiency of the individual devices, but managing and optimizing the energy utilization on a system level. The systems will therefore inevitably consist of devices and sensors from different vendors, and open interfaces enabling further extensions. The interfaces need to be properly standardized and offer external access on a semantic level both to any manageable and controllable function of the system as a whole, and to any device that is part of the system.
However, the problem is not the lack of available standards. Actually, there already exist many standards, too many really, all dealing with a smaller or larger part of the problem, sometimes overlapping and competing. Various workshops and projects already explored this field and concluded that defining a useful and applicable reference data model should in principle be possible. One single, reference ontology could be created to cover the needs of all appliances relevant for energy efficiency, and it can be expanded to cover future intelligence requirements. The European Commission therefore issued a tender for a Study on “Available Semantics Assets for the Interoperability of Smart Appliances. Mapping into a Common Ontology as a M2M Application Layer Semantics”, defining 3 tasks:
 Task 1: Take stock of existing semantic assets and use case assets
 Task 2: Perform a translation exercise of each model (or use case) to a common ontology language and a mapping or matching exercise between all the models
 Task 3: Propose a reference ontology and document the ontology into the ETSI M2M architecture