Welcome! How to Participate

Welcome!

If you want to participate in the development process, but don't know how to start, this article is for you!

Get to Know our Project

First of all, you can download our ontology and click through it a bit (e.g. with Protégé) to get an overview of what it is about.

Our scientific paper with an introduction of the OEO "Introducing the Open Energy Ontology: Enhancing Data Interpretation and Interfacing in Energy Systems Analysis" you can find here.

Documents about the structure of our ontology, its modules, and the underlying BFO ontology can be found here.

Contribute as an Ontology or Domain Expert

We're always looking for people or project teams who want to get involved and extend the team! Our current team consists of domain experts (with energy systems analysis background) and ontology experts (e.g. computer scientists).

• If you are a domain expert you can contribute in discussions to share and help with your knowledge
• If you are an ontology expert you can contribute in discussions to help categorize the proposed terms and implement them The "getting used to the OEO" process might take some time and work. A regular and contiuous engagement in github discussions and participation in online dev meetings will probably make that process smooth and successful.

Our Workflow

Please see here for our workflows. For the general implementation workflow see our CONTRIBUTING.md file

Helpful Resources

• Github's Getting Started page
• Protégé's user guides
• BOOKS:
  • Arp, Smith and Spear (2015) Building Ontologies with Basic Formal Ontology
  • Keet (2018), Introduction to Ontology Engineering
• The classic Manchester tutorial on OWL and Protégé
• BFO and ontologies tutorial by Barry Smith
• Further tutorials in this wiki
• OEO paper "Introducing the Open Energy Ontology: Enhancing Data Interpretation and Interfacing in Energy Systems Analysis"

Prerequisits

Become a member of the Open Energy Family Organisation.

Finding Issues to Contribute

If you want to participate, first find issues that you think you can help solving. Some ways to do that are:

• simply scroll through the Issues page and see if you find something that interests you
• use our Issues Project to find all our issues sorted into...
  • "To Do's": issues that were not discussed yet, or were only discussed a little
  • "In discussion": issues that are under discussion right now, for which solutions are being proposed and discussed, and help is always needed
  • further categories for issues that are getting implemented, reviewed or are done
• on the Issues page you have a variety of options to filter the issues by the next milestone, most commented or least updated issues