Choosing the Right Ontology to Describe Research Data in the Energy Domain

As in all disciplines, increasing the FAIRness (findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability) of research data and software is a goal in energy research. In order to achieve this, it is important to identify the most appropriate ontology for the description of research data and software. However, despite the importance of this task, it still presents a significant challenge. While there are some comparisons of ontologies, a gap exists in assessing their usefulness according to ontology metadata. This paper fills this gap by defining 21 criteria sorted into four categories to help researchers choose ontologies in the energy domain. The criteria are used to compare eight ontologies for energy research to showcase their use and analyze the ontologies. The analysis reveals the Open Energy Ontology (OEO) as the top-ranked ontology. This underscores the importance of metadata comparison in ontology selection and highlights the benefits of incorporating metadata criteria into ontology terminology services to support researchers.