Towards cognitive cities in the energy domain

Current cities address efficiency challenges for optimizing the use of limited resources. City sustainability and resilience must also be improved through new learning and cognitive technologies that change citizen behavioural patterns and react to disruptive changes. These technologies will allow the evolution of current cities towards the so called “Cognitive Cities”. This chapter highlights the importance of Semantic Web and semantic ontologies as a foundation for learning and cognitive systems. Energy is one of the city domains where learning and cognitive systems are needed. This chapter reviews Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)-based energy management solutions developed to improve city energy efficiency, sustainability and resilience. The review focuses on learning and cognitive solutions that improve energy sustainability and resilience through Semantic Web technologies. In addition, these solutions are evaluated from level of acceptance and use of semantics perspectives. The evaluation highlights that the Cognitive City approach is in the early stages in the energy domain and demonstrates the need for a standard energy ontology.