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Reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the transport sector is among the hardest challenges in transforming energy systems to zero emissions. Transport energy demands are driven by an interplay of social behavioral, technical factors, political decisions and economic conditions, motivating detailed transport demand modelling.

•The field of energy systems analysis suffers from heterogeneous data, incompatible definitions and irreproducible models. Ontologies, particularly the presented Open Energy Ontology helps to solve these problems.•Ontologies are a precondition for model coupling, semantic analyses of data, and data re-use.•The Open Energy Ontology offers a common description of knowledge and vocabulary which is used across domains and different modelling approaches.•The Open Energy Ontology is embedded within a broad community process to ensure the broadest coverage possible.•Use cases demonstrate the added value of an ontology in the energy domain.