Renewable Energy Data Sources in the Semantic Web with OpenWatt

Although the sector of renewable energies has gained a significant role, companies still encounter considerable barriers to scale up their business. This is partly due to the way data and information are (wrongly) managed. Often, data is: partially available, noisy, inconsistent, sparse in heterogeneous sources, unstructured, represented through non-standard and proprietary formats. As a result, energy planning tasks are semi-automatic or, in the worst cases, even manual. As a result, the process that uses such data is exceedingly complex and results to be error-prone and ineffective. OpenWatt aims at establishing an ideal scenario in the renewable energy sector where different categories of data are fully integrated and can synergically complement each other. In particular, OpenWatt overcomes existing drawbacks by introducing the paradigm of Linked Open Data to represent renewable energy data on the (Semantic) Web. With OpenWatt, data increases in quality, tools become interoperable with each other and the process gains in usability, productivity and efficiency. Moreover, OpenWatt enables and favours the development of new applications and services.