In the engineering and manufacturing domain, there is currently an atmosphere of departure to a new era of digitized production. In different regions, initiatives in these directions are known under different names, such as industrie du futur in France, industrial internet in the US or Industrie 4.0 in Germany. While the vision of digitizing production and manufacturing gained much traction lately, it is still relatively unclear how this vision can actually be implemented with concrete standards and technologies. Within the German Industry 4.0 initiative, the concept of an Administrative Shell was devised to respond to these requirements. The Administrative Shell is planned to provide a digital representation of all information being available about and from an object which can be a hardware system or a software platform. In this paper, we present an approach to developing such a digital representation based on semantic knowledge representation formalisms such as RDF, RDF Schema and OWL. We present our concept of a Semantic I4.0 Component which addresses the communication and comprehension challenges in Industry 4.0 scenarios using semantic technologies. Our approach is illustrated with a concrete example showing its benefits in a real-world use case.
In this paper we address the research question, how an infrastructure for digital object memories (DOMe) has to be designed. Primary goal is to identify and develop components and processes of an architecture concept particularly suited to represent, manage, and use digital object memories. In order to leverage acceptance and deployment of this novel technology, the envisioned infrastructure has to include tools for integration of new systems, and for migration with existing systems. Special requirements to object memories result from the heterogeneity of data in so-called open-loop scenarios. On the one hand, it has to be flexible enough to handle different data types. On the other hand, a simple and structured data access is required. Depending on the application scenario, the latter one needs to be complemented with concepts for a rights- and role-based access and version control. We present a framework based on a structuring data model and a set of tools to create new and to migrate existing applications to digital object memories. The SemProM format was basically designed for on-product RFID-based memories. Furthermore, some use cases demand centralized storage or data backups that cannot be achieved with on-product storage. For these cases (e.g., cheap products with very small labels, very large memories), a server-based solution might be more suitable. We developed the Object Memory Server (OMS) as an index server for product memories, based on the same set of metadata as the block format. The actual payload is outsourced to servers in the web. The URL used for accessing an OMS memory can be stored in simple and cheap RFID labels. Due to the large processing power of a server-based approach, the OMS can handle all SemProM incarnations, ranging from Reference SemProMs to Smart SemProMs. The conceptual ideas of the OMS were also transformed to provide a server-based solution for memories based on the W3C XG OMM format. This report summarizes the findings of the Object Memory Modeling Incubator Group. An XML-based object memory format is introduced, which allows for modeling of events or other information about individual physical artifacts, and which is designed to support data storage of those logs on so-called "smart labels" attached to the physical artifact. The group makes several recommendations concerning the future evolution of the object memory format at the W3C; these address connections to provenance modeling, the embedding of object memories in web pages, and potential benefits of an object memory API.