WESgraph: a Graph Database for the Wind Farm Domain

Abstract. The construction and management of an offshore wind farm involves many disciplines. It is hard for a single designer or developer to keep an overview of all the relevant concepts, models, and tools. Nevertheless, this is needed when performing integrated modeling or analysis. To help researchers keep this overview, we have created OWFgraph, a knowledge base for the offshore wind farm domain, implemented as a graph database. This paper presents the structure of this graph database – content stored in nodes and relationships between them – as a foundational ontology, which classifies the domain’s concepts. This foundational ontology partitions the domain in two: a part describing physical aspects and a part describing mathematical and computational aspects. This paper also discusses a number of general difficult cases that exist when adding content to such a knowledge base. This paper furthemore discusses the potential applications of OWFgraph and illustrate its use for computation pathway discovery – the application that triggered its creation. It also contains a description of our practical experience with its design and use and our thoughts about the community use and management of this tool.