  Energy disaggregation is the process of estimating the energy consumed by
individual electrical appliances given only a time series of the whole-home
power demand. Energy disaggregation researchers require datasets of the power
demand from individual appliances and the whole-home power demand. Multiple
such datasets have been released over the last few years but provide metadata
in a disparate array of formats including CSV files and plain-text README
files. At best, the lack of a standard metadata schema makes it unnecessarily
time-consuming to write software to process multiple datasets and, at worse,
the lack of a standard means that crucial information is simply absent from
some datasets. We propose a metadata schema for representing appliances,
meters, buildings, datasets, prior knowledge about appliances and appliance
models. The schema is relational and provides a simple but powerful inheritance
mechanism.
