A methodology for creating reusable ontologies

Applications within the Internet of Things (IoT) increasingly build upon Semantic Web technologies to ensure interoperability of devices and applications. Hereby, a central aspect is knowledge representation, and in particular how devices can store and exchange semantic data. This paper defines and discusses a methodology for creating application-specific ontologies for the IoT. The two main objectives are to reuse existing knowledge on one hand and to derive reusable ontologies on the other hand. Thereby, a multi-agent system for switching optimization in the smart energy domain serves as a motivating example.