General Adaptation Framework: Enabling Interoperability for Industrial Web Resources

Abstract

Integration of heterogeneous applications and data sources into an interoperable system is one of the most relevant challenges for many knowledge-based corporations nowadays. Development of a global environment that would support knowledge transfer from human experts to automated Web services, which are able to learn, is a very profit-promising and challenging task. The domain of industrial maintenance is not an exception. This chapter outlines in detail an approach for adaptation of heterogeneous Web resources into a unified environment as a first step toward interoperability of smart industrial resources, where distributed human experts and learning Web services are utilized by various devices for self monitoring and self diagnostics. The proposed General Adaptation Framework utilizes a potential of the Semantic Web technology and primarily focuses on the aspect of a semantic adaptation (or mediation) of existing widely used models of data representation to RDF-based semantically rich format. To perform the semantic adaptation of industrial resources, the approach of two-stage transformation (syntactical and semantic) is elaborated and implemented for monitoring of a concrete industrial device with underlying XML-based data representation model as a use case.