An important part of scientific FAIRness is standardizing the terminologies used to describe data and other research artifacts. Semantic agreement and comprehensive metadata are necessary to help researchers quickly find, share, connect, and reuse data. To this end, Task Area 4 is preparing the resources that will form a semantic backbone for NFDI4Energy’s services. These resources include ontologies to describe the energy domain and various specialized aspects of this domain, as well as metadata standards for shared data, and extensions to the TIB Terminology Service for improved ontology discovery and management. We are working closely with the Open Energy Ontology to further develop this resource. Within Task Area 4, we also established the Open Energy Ontologies Foundry (OEO Foundry) in early 2025 – an initiative to define principles and best practices for energy ontology development, and to track the adherence of existing and new ontologies to these principles, in an effort to improve the quality of ontologies in this field.

Objectives

• Establish ontologies covering the domain of energy systems research and subfields within this domain, such as energy-related governmental policies and long-term energy simulation scenarios.
• Define metadata schemas tailored for energy systems research data.
• Create a registry of energy domain ontologies within the TIB Terminology Service, and extend the service with new tools for annotation and term exploration.
• Build the OEO Foundry collection of design principles for energy ontologies as a resource for both developers and users of ontologies.

Participating partners

• Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU)
• Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)
• OFFIS – Institut für Informatik
• Reiner Lemoine Institut
• Leibniz-Informationszentrum Technik und Naturwissenschaften – Universitätsbibliothek
• Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg
• Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg
• University of Osnabrück

Services used or developed

• Open Energy Database
• Open Energy Scenario Bundles
• Open Energy Ontology, which is accessed through the Open Energy Platform or the Terminology Service
• OEMetadata schema, which is accessed through the Open Energy Platform
• TIB Terminology Service

Links to output that has been generated

• Open Energy Ontologies Foundry
• NFDI4Energy Conference 2025 – Workshop 3: Introduction of the OEO Foundry for Interoperable Ontologies in NFDI4Energy and the Energy Domain
• NFDI4Energy Deliverable D4.5.1.1 Policy ontology report & Excel spreadsheet
• Unveiling Openness in Energy Research: A Bibliometric Analysis Focusing on Open Access and Data Sharing Practices
• Query Term Recommendation Using Domain-Specific Ontologies and Sentence Transformers
• D4.3.1 Technical requirements for metadata in NFDI4Energy services
• D4.4.1.2 Federated Architecture for Federated Search
• D4.4.2.3 1st Version of the Leibniz Data Manager
• D4.4.1.1 Implementation of Federated Access
• D4.5.1.1 Policy ontology report & Excel spreadsheet
• FAIR Data for Energy System Research
• Developing Interoperable Ontologies for Research Data Management in the Energy Domain
• NFDI4Energy Task Area 4: FAIR Data for Energy System Research
• Towards FAIR Data in Energy System Research: Challenges and Perspectives