SAREF4INMA: a SAREF extension for the Industry and Manufacturing domain

Tracking #: 2325-3538

Authors: 
Mike de Roode
Laura Daniele
Alba Fernández-Izquierdo
Maria Poveda
Raúl García-Castro

Responsible editor: 
Guest Editors SemWeb of Things for Industry 4.0 - 2019

Submission type: 
Ontology Description
Abstract: 
The IoT landscape is characterized by a fragmentation of standards, platforms and technologies, often scattered among different vertical domains. To prevent the market to continue to be fragmented and power-less, a protocol-independent semantic layer can serve as enabler of interoperability among the various smart devices from different manufacturers that co-exist in a specific industry domain, but also across different domains. To that end, the SAREF ontology was created in 2015 with the intention to interconnect data, enabling the communication between IoT devices that use different protocols and standards. A number of industrial sectors consequently expressed their interest to extend SAREF into their domains in order to fill the gaps of the semantics not yet covered by their communication protocols. Therefore, the SAREF4INMA ontology was recently created to extend SAREF for describing the Smart Industry & Manufacturing domain. SAREF4INMA is based on several standards and IoT initiatives, as well as on real use cases, and includes classes, properties and instances specifically created to cover the industry and manufacturing domain. This work describes the approach followed to develop this ontology, specifies its requirements and also includes a practical example of how to use it.
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Reviewed

Decision/Status: 
Minor Revision

Solicited Reviews:
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Review #1
Anonymous submitted on 06/Nov/2019
Suggestion:
Accept
Review Comment:

Section 4.2 – Implementation has been revised significantly. It contains a detailed explanation
on how one could analyze the coverage of the ontology.
The authors have extended the description of the proposed methodology. Moreover, Section 6
presents a detailed discussion on modeling decision, including a table with the number of
classes that have been added to the SAREF4INMA ontology and that have been reused from
the SAREF and SAREF4BLDG ontologies.
The scope of the paper is enhanced by mentioning how the proposed approach address the
interoperability between production machines. In addition to this, this paper describes some
decisions made related to the concept ProductionEquipmentCategory and Concept
FeatureOfInterest.
A table in Section 6 has been added with the number of classes, properties and individuals in
the SAREF4INMA ontology. the table also indicates the topics related to the terms defined in
the SAREF4INMA, the SAREF and the SAREF4BLDG ontology in order to provide an overview
of which are the terms reused in the new ontology.
Section 4.2 has been revised to address the unclairity regarding “Batch”, which includes its
definition and relations.
Section 6 has been updated by improving the explanation about the decision made regarding
this topic. The analysed standards (e.g., IEC 62264, OPC UA or AutomationML) are related to a
wide range of topics, including production equipment, material, storage or life-cycles.
The typos have been addressed carefully.

Review #2
Anonymous submitted on 27/Feb/2020
Suggestion:
Minor Revision
Review Comment:

The paper is improved with the work done by the authors. Review on various aspects of the major revision done this time as below:
Coverage
-Authors have done some more work on coverage with Themis tool. It gives an indication of the coverage of the ontology, however, the details provided are really scant. Please provide more details on what test cases were used with Themis, including a detailed breakdown of these cases and detailed reasoning behind selecting such cases and a few examples. Also, it will be good to provide some detailed analysis of requirements that did not pass, including a few examples.

Ontology design issues
New details are provided but this is still a weak point in the paper - a paper on ontology description should have design/methodology consideration clearly outlined.

Further concept specification or clarification (e.g. batch, cycles, etc) and statistical information
This is covered well.