The disruptive potential of the upcoming digital transformations for the industrial manufacturing domain have led to several reference frameworks and numerous standardization approaches. On the other hand, the Semantic Web community has made significant contributions in the field, for instance on data and service description, integration of heterogeneous sources and devices, and AI techniques in distributed systems. These two streams of work are, however, mostly unrelated and only briefly regard the each others requirements, practices and terminology. We contribute to this gap by providing the Semantic Asset Administration Shell, an RDF-based representation of the Industrie 4.0 Component. We provide an ontology for the latest data model specification, created a RML mapping, supply resources to validate the RDF entities and introduce basic reasoning on the Asset Administration Shell data model. Furthermore, we discuss the different assumptions and presentation patterns, and analyze the implications of a semantic representation on the original data. We evaluate the thereby created overheads, and conclude that the semantic lifting is manageable, also for restricted or embedded devices, and therefore meets the conditions of Industrie 4.0 scenarios.

The ongoing digital transformation has the potential to revolutionize nearly all industrial manufacturing processes. However, its concrete requirements and implications are still not sufficiently investigated. In order to establish a common understanding, a multitude of initiatives have published guidelines, reference frameworks and specifications, all intending to promote their particular interpretation of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). As a result of the inconsistent use of terminology, heterogeneous structures and proposed processes, an opaque landscape has been created. The consequence is that both new users and experienced experts can hardly manage to get an overview of the amount of information and publications, and make decisions on what is best to use and to adopt. This work contributes to the state of the art by providing a structured analysis of existing reference frameworks, their classifications and the concerns they target. We supply alignments of shared concepts, identify gaps and give a structured mapping of regarded concerns at each part of the respective reference architectures. Furthermore, the linking of relevant industry standards and technologies to the architectures allows a more effective search for specifications and guidelines and supports the direct technology adoption.

The digital revolution affects every aspect of society and economy. In particular, the manufacturing industry faces a new age of production processes and connected collaboration. The underlying ideas and concepts, often also framed as a new “Internet of Things”, transfer IT technologies to the shop floor, entailing major challenges regarding the heterogeneity of the domain. On the other hand, web technologies have already proven their value in distributed settings. SOLID (derived from “social linked data”) is a recent approach to decentralize data control and standardize interactions for social applications in the web. Extending this approach towards industrial applications has the potential to bridge the gap between the World Wide Web and local manufacturing environments. This paper proposes SOLIOT—a combination of lightweight industrial protocols with the integration and data control provided by SOLID. An in-depth requirement analysis examines the potential but also current limitations of the approach. The conceptual capabilities are outlined, compared and extended for the IoT protocols CoAP and MQTT. The feasibility of the approach is illustrated through an open-source implementation, which is evaluated in a virtual test bed and a detailed analysis of the proposed components.