Niklas Petersen

VoCol: An Integrated Environment to Support Version-Controlled Vocabulary Development

Vocabularies are increasingly being developed on platforms for hosting version-controlled repositories, such as GitHub. However, these platforms lack important features that have proven useful in vocabulary development. We present VoCol, an integrated environment that supports the development of vocabularies using Version Control Systems. VoCol is based on a fundamental model of vocabulary development, consisting of the three core activities modeling, population, and testing. We implemented VoCol using a loose coupling of validation, querying, analytics, visualization, and documentation generation components on top of a standard Git repository. All components, including the version-controlled repository, can be configured and replaced with little effort to cater for various use cases. We demonstrate the applicability of VoCol with a real-world example and report on a user study that confirms its usability and usefulness.

Towards Versioning of Arbitrary RDF Data

Coherent and consistent tracking of provenance data and in particular update history information is a crucial building block for any serious information system architecture. Version Control Systems can be a part of such an architecture enabling users to query and manipulate versioning information as well as content revisions. In this paper, we introduce an RDF versioning approach as a foundation for a full featured RDF Version Control System. We argue that such a system needs support for all concepts of the RDF specification including support for RDF datasets and blank nodes. Furthermore, we placed special emphasis on the protection against unperceived history manipulation by hashing the resulting patches. In addition to the conceptual analysis and an RDF vocabulary for representing versioning information, we present a mature implementation which captures versioning information for changes to arbitrary RDF datasets.

TurtleEditor: An Ontology-Aware Web-Editor for Collaborative Ontology Development

Inspired by the shift of vocabulary development projects towards repository hosting services such as GitHub, we noticed the lack of ontology-aware editors that can be easily connected to these repositories. This motivated us to build a web client optimized for the communication with external repositories and including specific functionalities to ease the participation in collaborative ontology development efforts also for non-expert contributors. This paper describes TurtleEditor, an open-source web editor, which can load files from, and commit changes to a central repository and offers features such as syntax highlighting, syntax checking, auto-completion and a SPARQL endpoint to query the ontology.

Monitoring and Automating Factories Using Semantic Models

Keeping factories running at any time is a critical task for every manufacturing enterprise. Optimizing the flows of goods and services inside and between factories is a challenge that attracts much attention in research and business. The idea to fully describe a factory in a digital form to improve decision making is called a virtual factory. While promising virtual factory frameworks have been proposed, their semantic models lack depth and suffer from limited expressiveness. We propose an enhanced semantic model of a factory, which enables views spanning from the high level of supply chains to the low level of machines on the shop floor. The model includes a mapping to relational production databases to support federated queries on different legacy systems in use. We evaluate the model in a production line use case, demonstrating that it can be used for typical factory tasks, such as assembly line identification or machine availability checks.

SCORVoc: Vocabulary-Based Information Integration and Exchange in Supply Networks

Advanced, highly specialized economies require instant, robust and efficient information flows within its value-added and Supply Chain networks. Especially also in the context of the recent Industry 4.0, smart manufacturing or cyber-physical systems initiatives more efficient and effective information exchange in supply networks is of paramount importance. The Supply Chain Operation Reference (SCOR) is a cross-industry approach to lay the groundwork for this goal by defining a conceptual model for Supply Chain related information. Semantics-based approaches could facilitate information flows in supply networks, and enable to analyze, monitor and optimize Supply Chains (in particular for robustness). This paper first reviews existing formalizations of the Supply Chain Councils SCOR standard. It then introduces the SCORVoc RDFS vocabulary which fully formalizes the latest SCOR standard, while over-coming the identified limitations of existing work. SCORVoc is operationalized by a set of SPARQL queries, that enable to evaluate metrics and key performance indicator (KPIs) defined by SCOR, on-the-fly, in an information systems that adheres to the vocabulary. Finally, we define concrete test scenarios and implement a synthetic benchmark to demonstrate the practicality of SCORVoc.

TurtleEditor: A Web-Based RDF Editor to Support Distributed Ontology Development on Repository Hosting Platforms

Ontologies are increasingly being developed on web-based repository hosting platforms such as GitHub. Accordingly, there is a demand for ontology editors which can be easily connected to the hosted...

Towards Federated, Semantics-Based Supply Chain Analytics

Supply Chain Management aims at optimizing the flow of goods and services from the producer to the consumer. Closely interconnected enterprises that align their production, logistics and procurement with one another thus enjoy a competitive advantage in the market. To achieve a close alignment, an instant, robust and efficient information flow along the supply chain between and within enterprises is required. However, less efficient human communication is often used instead of automatic systems because of the great diversity of enterprise systems and models. This paper describes an approach and its implementation SCM Intelligence App, which enables the configuration of individual supply chains together with the execution of industry accepted performance metrics. Based on machine-processable supply chain data model (the SCORVoc RDF vocabulary implementing the SCOR standard) and W3C standardized protocols such as SPARQL, the approach represents an alternative to closed software systems, which lack support for inter-organizational supply chain analysis. Finally, we demonstrate the practicality of our approach using a prototypical implementation and a test scenario.

Distributed Linked Data Business Communication Networks: The LUCID Endpoint

With the LUCID Endpoint, we demonstrate how companies can utilize Linked Data technology to provide major data items for their business partners in a timely manner, machine readable and with open and extensible schemata. The main idea is to provide a Linked Data infrastructure which enables all partners to fetch, as well as to clone and to synchronize datasets from other partners over the network. This concept allows for building of networks of business partners much like as social network but in a distributed manner. It furthermore provides a technical infrastructure for business communication acts such as supply chain communication or master data management.

Realizing an RDF-Based Information Model for a Manufacturing Company – A Case Study

The digitization of the industry requires information models describing assets and information sources of companies to enable the semantic integration and interoperable exchange of data. We report on a case study in which we realized such an information model for a global manufacturing company using semantic technologies. The information model is centered around machine data and describes all relevant assets, key terms and relations in a structured way, making use of existing as well as newly developed RDF vocabularies. In addition, it comprises numerous RML mappings that link different data sources required for integrated data access and querying via SPARQL. The technical infrastructure and methodology used to develop and maintain the information model is based on a Git repository and utilizes the development environment VoCol as well as the Ontop framework for Ontology Based Data Access. Two use cases demonstrate the benefits and opportunities provided by the information model. We evaluated the approach with stakeholders and report on lessons learned from the case study.