Linked Data in Renewable Energy Domain

The vision of the Semantic Web is to build a global Web of data that links different resources. To this end, the first step is to put data on the Web in the form that machines can naturally understand or convert to useful forms. This can be achieved through Linked Data technology, an emerging publishing paradigm in which not only documents, but also data are linked over the Web. The ultimate goal underpinning Linked Data is to enable different individuals and organisations to efficiently contribute and share data about different domains. Climate change impacts and/or energy scarcity are among the leading challenges that the international community currently faces. The domain of renewable energy (RE) is widely believed to be an innovative domain that can contribute significantly in overcoming these challenges. Consequently, the institutionalisation of policies/strategies that can potentially lead to the uptake of RE technologies by various organisations is now too common. Employing Linked Data paradigm in managing knowledge provides opportunities for disparate organisations and people to efficiently learn and share knowledge about RE technologies, hence potentially leading to their applications in different projects by end-users. However, given the nascent nature of Linked Data technology, knowledge on how it has been employed in managing RE knowledge is still very limited. In this paper, an exploration of the use of Linked Data in the RE and its relationship to other Linked Data of different domains will be conducted. Given the scope of the study, an exploratory desk-study methodology has been pursued. Furthermore, two Linked Data applications have been discussed.