Digital Reference: a quasi-standard for digitalization in the domain of semiconductor supply chains
Hans Ehm, Erwin Schoitsch, Jan Wytze van der Weit, Nour Ramzy, Lanyingzhu Luo, Daniel Louis Gruetzner · 2020
This paper is about the installation of trust in the Semantic Web content of the Digital Reference (DR). The DR was developed in H2020/ECSEL/Productive4.0, which contains ontologies to model production and Cyber Physical Systems addressing the whole industrial automation and control area. It should serve as a quasi-standard for digitalization in the domain of semiconductors and corresponding supply chains to overcome the partial incompatibility problem of existing standards.Semantic Web is a success story in the B2C (Business to consumer) environment as it is understandable for both humans and machines alike. To transfer this success of easy data exchange into the complex industrial B2B (Business to business) environment, a much higher quality is required - a standardization of the classes and properties. The confidence in standards usually comes from human verification, validation and confirmation, which has the disadvantage of being slow. Machine validation could be faster but often lacks confidence. Thus, how can trust be installed to ensure the "correctness" of the used classes and properties in a speedy process?We propose a human and machine blended approach based on peer review and Blockchain technology built on decentralized peer-to-peer networks to solve this problem. The consensus process combines transparency, traceability, immutability and speed of Blockchain with the fidelity of human experts.