Kick-off Meeting Report (July 2022)

The first kickoff meeting of the Semantic Industry (SemInd) W3C Community Group was held on July 1st, 2022 as an online meeting. Javad Chamanara opened the meeting by summarizing the history and the roots of the group and its current status. Then the three attendees introduced themself: Javad Chamanara L3S, Leibniz University of Hannover Germany, Felix Angel TIB Germany, and Abdelhak Khemiri EMSE France.

First Javad Chamanara gave an introduction to the purpose and goals of the group and delivered a talk explaining what does semantic industry mean, how it is accomplished and what are its potential impacts. Javad suggested making industrial systems “FAIR”, similar but not identical to the FAIR principles in data domains. The letters F, A, I, and R which stand for Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability are suggested to have customized (adapted) meanings to be applicable to industrial elements such as sensors, actuators, machines, product lines, and even products. For example, a temperature sensor should be able to explain its range, its unit of measurement, its error rate at each temperature, and its response time, when queried by a heat pump, an oil injection nuzzle, or a rotating furnace. Elements (similar to Assets in the RAMI model) should also be accessible to their neighbors, upper elements, and potentially to remote controllers so that they can interact and ask them to perform actions. In the automotive industry as an example, the HVAC may want to know the window positions of all of the passengers to optimize the airflow, or even to trigger the window controllers to pull up. For this purpose, the HVAC should be able to find, access, and interact with the window controllers! A water pump may expose its temperature-dependent capacity, e.g., 1000 l/h at 80°C and 800 l/h at 90°C. This information may be used by the cooling mechanism to optimize the system for constant flow, constant energy, constant temperature, or any other objective. and last but not least, Javad explained reusability as a means of replaceability using the semantic information of a device. In another word, a device is reusable if it can be replaced with another device, based on their semantic equivalence! This needs to semantically describe the structural, behavioral, configuration, and execution aspects of those elements.

Javad suggested using the RAMI model as the reference, as it provides an extensible multi-dimensional model than can describe Assets and their lifecycles from different perspectives and levels of granularity.

Afterward, Felix Engel presented the Digital Reference Ontology (DRO) and explained how it has been employed in the field of supply chain management for the semiconductor industry in the context of the EU-funded SC3 project. An interesting point in the use-case that Felix explained is the definition of product among participants of a supply chain, which can be a starting point to define it for various RAMI Asset levels. He also suggested that the DRO can be an initial attempt for integration with RAMI as well as an early effort for standardization.

The group decided to utilize the RAMI model as the reference model and enhance it with ontologies for every layer. The plan set for the first year is to identify, select, and introduce robust ontologies for the Asset layer.

The kickoff meeting was recorded and published on Youtube.