Energy

The Energy pilot (Regional Energy Planning – REP) explores how the SciLake ecosystem can support research on sustainable energy systems and regional/territorial energy planning by transforming fragmented scholarly outputs into a coherent, semantically enriched knowledge space.

At the core of the pilot is the Energy Scientific Knowledge Graph (SKG), built on top of the OpenAIRE Graph and enriched with domain-specific entities and links. This enables stakeholders to move beyond keyword-based literature search and instead explore energy research through thematic, geographic, and temporal perspectives, supporting evidence-informed decision-making for planning and governance contexts.

A key focus of the pilot has been geographically grounded analysis. The pilot contributed to mechanisms for geographic entity recognition (e.g., locations linked to the object of study and publishing institutions), enabling spatial exploration of where energy research is produced and what regions/contexts it addresses. In parallel, the pilot worked on connecting energy concepts to structured domain knowledge (e.g., IRENA-aligned Energy Types and Energy Storage technologies) to improve interpretability and downstream analytics.

The pilot demonstrator was designed around realistic, multi-step research workflows (from corpus definition to exploration and analysis), combining OpenAIRE Gateway configuration, entity extraction and semantic linking, citation-based indicators, and exploration through BIP! Spaces and graph engines (Neo4j / AvantGraph).

What we have achieved

The pilot’s journey has involved the following key steps:

• Defined and refined the Energy domain corpus through iterative configuration of an OpenAIRE Gateway, to align results with regional energy planning and reduce off-topic “energy” noise (e.g., metabolism/physics/psychology confounders).
• Identified key metadata representativity issues (e.g., uneven SDG coverage in recent years affecting apparent temporal trends) and used these findings to guide dataset interpretation and further refinement.
• Implemented and validated the Energy SKG structure in graph environments (initially Neo4j, later also AvantGraph), confirming queryability, interoperability, and readiness for end-to-end workflows.
• Integrated and tested enrichment services relevant to energy planning research, including extraction/linking of EnergyType, EnergyStorage, and Object of Study, plus exploratory geographic enrichment.
• Explored the corpus via BIP! Spaces to assess thematic coherence and to support user-friendly discovery before deeper graph-based analysis.
• Executed exploratory analytical queries to retrieve relationships between publications, energy technologies, and geographic entities (e.g., publication distributions by region; links between places and technologies through research outputs).
• Published the Scientific Knowledge Graph for Energy Planning Research as a dataset based on the OpenAIRE SKG-IF representation, providing core entity nodes and relationships for Agents, Data sources, Grants, Products, Manifestations, Topics, and Venues. 

Related News

• Press release: Sustainable regions require regional energy planning - SciLake’s “Energy pilot” launches “Regional Energy Planning Pilot” (April 2024)
• Presentation: The Energy Planning Gateway at the OpenAIRE Connect Community Call (July 2025) 
• Presentation: Enriching Scientific Knowledge Graphs with Geospatial Metadata: Toward Mapping the Energy Research Landscape in Europe, Open Science Fair (September 2025)
• Presentation: Toward Mapping the Energy Research Landscape Final SciLake dissemination event (March 2026)