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Foundational elements of the Alaska Energy Data Gateway

By Elizabeth Dobbins

May 20, 2025

In summer of 2024, the State of Alaska entrusted the University of Alaska with the task of rejuvenating the Alaska Energy Data Gateway (AEDG).

AEDG was originally created in 2013 as a single source of information about energy use and costs in Alaska communities by the (ISER) at the University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA) and the Alaska Energy Authority (AEA).

However, its data had not been updated for many years. Because successful decision making has become increasingly dependent on high quality, accessible data, the project’s goal is to create an intuitive dashboard where policy makers and community members can quickly see data important to their current budgets and future planning.

Ironically, the simpler the interface, the more work is required to identify what to show and what to leave out. This work began as soon as ACEP and ISER received the contract. An integral part of the planning was to determine the metadata we would need and the vocabulary we would use to identify content. 

What is metadata and how do we use it?

If we ask the temperature and are given a number, we have received only a portion of what we needed to know. All other aspects are inferred from context: Inside or outside? Fahrenheit or Celsius? Yesterday or right now? These are the metadata.

When we record data, we don’t know all the different contexts in which people will use our data. So, we include metadata to describe the data in a way that will answer people’s questions in the future when they use the data. Metadata must therefore describe the what, where, when, how of data collection and other useful information like the units and contact information of the data collector.

The added twist for the AEDG is that people won’t be using the data directly; they will be accessing it through a web interface. That means that a computer program needs to read the data and display it properly, and for that to work correctly, the metadata needs to be written in a specific way and follow an agreed upon standard format.

What are ontologies and how do we use them?

Going back to our temperature example, there are bigger questions that can’t be answered through metadata alone.

For instance, what is temperature anyway? Well, there’s an established answer for that one, but for AEDG’s display of community data, we needed to define the meaning of “community.” Is it a place, or a town, or a neighborhood, or a region? All those words have definitions, and some have relationships to each other; for instance, a town is in a region. These precise definitions and relationships can be summarized by an ontology.

Happily, there are lots of ontologies already developed so we didn’t have to write those ourselves. However, Alaska is an unusual place with unique organizational structures like Native corporations and utilities like the Alaska Village Electric Cooperative that operate geographically disconnected power plants across a wide area.

There were, therefore, some things that we did need to define clearly and unambiguously so we could build the database to support the AEDG.

What did we do?

ACEP is uniquely qualified to address these issues. Our data team includes information professionals who were able to define the requirements of the system and ask the questions needed to design it. We also have subject matter experts who can provide explanations about issues like the differences between load serving entities and independent power producers. Finally, we pulled in our external partners to help inform our design based on their stated needs and feedback.

We also had the benefit of recent work done in the intersection of energy forecast modeling and information systems. For our metadata standard, we decided to use (OEMetadata), which is an offshoot of packages. These standards are so well established and defined that we were able to quickly prototype web displays generated almost entirely from information encoded in the metadata.

OEMetadata has a companion product called the that describes many of the terms that can be used to describe our data. But we also stitched it together with:

• : A widely used classification scheme built around web semantics, so more applicable to internet-based services, of which AEDG is one;
• : Limited to only the most necessary terms;
• The : Describing the terms associated with the census;
• : An overview of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) and description of Alaska Native operating entities; and
• : Data-centric definitions of reporting and generation organizations.

With these elements, we have built a strong foundation for future data and metadata of the AEDG, one that should last for many years into the future.