Example: Standards on power plants

Example on standard setting for metadata: power plant information

Context

The purpose of this document is to illustrate, which options are available to reference resources for a given entry in a data table. As an example, resources for the concept of an onshore wind farm, a hydropower station, as well as a lithium battery are considered. The resources themselves are taken from general-purpose, community-edited knowledge graphs such as Wikidata or dbpedia, or specialized ontologies such as the open energy ontology.

Services to provide resources

List of ontologies used to reference power plant types:

* Wikidata - knowledge base, can be read and edited by both humans and machines, collects structured data in a free and collaborative way
* DBpedia - knowledge graphs that extracts structured content from the information created in the Wikipedia
* Open Energy Ontology - domain ontology within the field of energy system modelling
* EuroVoc - multilingual thesaurus maintained by the Publications Office of the European Union 
* GEMET - GEneral Multilingual Environmental Thesaurus updated by EEA and Eionet
* [FAO] 
* KBpedia - open-source knowledge graph 

Example 1: Onshore Wind farm

This example compares resources for onshore wind farm definition:

* wikidata:Q50687555 
  literal name: onshore wind farm
  definition: group of wind turbines on land

* dbr:Onshore_wind_farm
  literal name: actual redirects to dbr:Wind_farm 
  definition: A wind farm or wind park, also called a wind power station or wind power plant, is a group of wind turbines in the same location used to produce electricity. ...

* oeo:OEO_00000311 
  literal name: onshore wind farm
  definition: An onshore wind farm is a wind farm that is build on land, ( where a windfarm (OEO_00000447) is a power plant that has wind energy converting units as parts.

* gemet:9336
 literal name: wind power station
 definition: Power station which uses wind to drive a turbine which creates electricity.

* iec:415-01-03
  literal name: wind power station
  definition: power station comprising a group or groups of wind turbine generator systems

The problems we encounter here are: GEMET does not offer a resource to directly describe an onshore wind farm. Rather, what is available is a resource related to a wind farm in general. Similarly, KBpedia has only a resource relating to a wind farm. Same applies to IEC.DBpedia offers a resource link for an onshore wind farm, but does not provide a separate definition. On the other hand, wikidata and the open energy ontology offer specific definition, which seem to be very similar, if one identifies wind turbines with wind energy converting units.

Example 2: Hydropower plant

This example compares different definitions of hydropower plants provided by various ontologies/controlled vocabularies:

* wikidata:Q1591738: 
  literal name: hydroelectric power station
  definition: facility generating electric power using hydroelectricity

* oeo:OEO_00010086:
  literal name: hydro power plant
  definition: A hydro power plant is a power plant having an aggregate of hydro power generating units as its power generating unit parts.

* gemet:4098:
  literal name: hydroelectric power plant
  definition: Power station which operates with the free renewable source of energy provided by falling water.

* kbpedia:HydroelectricPowerStation
  literal name: Hydroelectric power station
  definition: This commodity category is for hydro power plant. This product category corresponds to the UNSPSC code: 26131503.
  

Note, that dbpedia and EuroVoc do not provide a resource specifically describing a hydropower plant. They rather offer definitions on the general concept of hydropower technology. kbpedia offers no explicit definition, but rather refers to the United Nations Standard Products and Services Code and its entry No. 26131503. Searching for this resource on the landing page returns only a literal description as 'Hydro power plants' without further explanation.

Example 3: Solar PV plant

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Example 4: Lithium-ion battery

This example compares resources for lithium-ion batteries provided by the different providers:

* wikidata:Q2822895:
  literal name: lithium-ion battery
  definition: rechargeable battery type

* dbr:Lithium-ion_battery:
  literal name: Lithium-ion battery
  definition: A lithium-ion battery or Li-ion battery is a type of rechargeable battery composed of cells in which lithium ions move from the negative electrode through an electrolyte to the positive electrode during discharge and back when charging.

* oeo:OEO_00000248
  literal name: lithium-ion battery
  definition: A lithium-ion battery is a battery that is rechargeable and in which lithium ions move from the negative electrode to the positive electrode during discharge, and back when charging. Li-ion batteries use an intercalated lithium compound as one electrode material.

* kbpedia:LithiumIonBattery
  literal name: lithium-ion battery
  definition: A lithium-ion battery or Li-ion battery is a type of rechargeable battery in which lithium ions move from the negative electrode to the positive electrode during discharge and back when charging.

* gemet:745
  literal name: battery
  definition: A series of cells, each containing the essentials for producing voltaic electricity, connected together.

* iec:482-05-07
  literal name: lithium ion battery
  definition: secondary battery with an organic solvent electrolyte and positive and negative electrodes which utilize an intercalation compound in which lithium is stored

Note that GEMET does not offer the concept of a lithium-ion battery, available sub-classes are alkaline battery, button-cell battery, cell (energy), and electric battery.

References

Booshehri, M. et al. Introducing the Open Energy Ontology: Enhancing data interpretation and interfacing in energy systems analysis. Energy and AI 5, 100074 (2021).

Simon Clark, Francesca L. Bleken, Simon Stier, Eibar Flores, Casper Welzel Andersen, Marek Marcinek, Anna Szczesna-Chrzan, Miran Gaberscek, M. Rosa Palacin, Martin Uhrin, and Jesper Friis, Toward a Unified Description of Battery Data, 12, 2102762 () https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/aenm.202102702