Semantic annotation engine for smart grid applications

The advance of Smart Grid concepts towards lower-voltage layers of the electricity grid connects an enormous number of devices, many of them through legacy automation protocols, to back-end IT systems. With many of these devices giving little or no indication as to the semantics of their data, it is customary to manually engineer this information, which is cumbersome, costly and prone to errors. In this paper, we follow the web of things approach to introduce a smart aggregation layer device which allows for easy annotation of data with URIs tying into well-established ontologies, thus abstracting from technical addressing schemes. We present an annotation engine that can interlink actors of different sophistication levels in a light-weight messaging scheme, distributing data between operative algorithms, communication applications and operator interfaces. We present results of an ongoing field deployment of this approach in Austrian Smart Grids model regions.