Competency questions for a test first development of an energy systems analysis ontology

Abstract

The field of energy systems research is highly interdisciplinary and handles large amounts of complex data. This complexity calls for specific data management methods. Formal structures like ontologies are increasingly being used to organize information of this field. However, such methods have to be balanced against application development needs. Thus, it is important to be able to evaluate the usefulness of an ontology. This paper is about translating example research questions into queries. These queries can be used to evaluate the completeness of an ontology. They are an instance of what in ontology development are called competency questions. We focus on their use in test first infrastructures. The output of this study is a collection of nine such queries with a detailed explanation of how they were designed. These results are intended to offer an energy systems researcher strategies to organize their demands in regards knowledge graph design. This may help them perform better data management decisions, which have implications on understandability and performance. We emphasize that knowledge organization in such an interdisciplinary field requires splitting up the effort into smaller research units that can later be unified in a larger knowledge graph.