Integrating industrial middleware in Linked Data collaboration networks
Markus Graube, Leon Urbas, Jan Hladík · 2016
Within the Semantic Web field, Linked Data is an emerging technology offering advantages in terms of flexibility and openness also for industrial environments. It provides a powerful information model with simple extension mechanisms and a cross-domain character, which makes it possible to span flexible information spaces across enterprise boundaries. Thus, it is able to represent all facets of a digital plant, like devices and processes. Although developed with the focus on static data, it is also capable of handling dynamic data if the latter is adapted appropriately. This article describes these requirements and presents a concept for integrating process data into the Linked Data information space. A separation between a semantic description of the access to process data and the service providing exactly this information allows efficient and integration-ready access to data. The necessary vocabulary is described as well as the information model. A prototypical implementation of OPC UA integration into Linked Data is presented. The article further discusses the current status of the approach and provides future research challenges.