The Internet of Things (IoT) is a federated cluster of technologies involving a wide range of concepts from connectivity, security, privacy, up to scalability, and is currently increasingly being employed in different domains, like Industry 4.0, Smart Health, Smart City, or Forestry 4.0.
Interoperability refers to the ability for multiple objects within an IoT to effectively communicate and share information among them. This deals with the vibrant Things that are not only vertically integrated within a specific industry or application in a closed IoT infrastructure, but are also interconnected in a decentralized manner across various horizontal IoT ecosystems, e.g., Gaia-X. The optimization of the interoperability bridges the gap between technical silos by enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of the exchange of data and services and, thus, becomes a crucial pillar to ensure the success of a scalable IoT network.
Towards a secure, decentralized communication among Things with respect to technical and organizational heterogeneity, the Smart Systems Service Infrastructure (S³I) – developed at MMI – is dedicated to a variety of fields of application, one being Forestry 4.0. In this domain, different forms of communication and the use of resulting domain specific data formats (e.g., ELDATsmart1, StanForD20102, papiNet3, UBL4) and general or domain specific modelling languages (ForestML 4.05, AAS6, W3C/WoT7) complicate the mapping of heterogeneous value-added chains and the automation of processes.
Ontologies are a formal representation of a set of concepts and their interrelationships in a given domain. Hence, the integration of ontologies in IoT becomes auch a common trend to describe the relationships between entities, here, especially Things.
In this thesis, a generic ontology-based concept shall be developed and prototypically implemented to interpret the meaning of information (data, services) in the above-mentioned data formats and modelling languages. The developed concept shall be validated by defining meaningful key performance indicators (KPI) in emulated scenarios in the context of Forestry 4.0.
[1]: https://www.eldatstandard.de/start
[2]: https://www.skogforsk.se/english/projects/stanford/stanford-2010/
[4]: https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=ubl
[5]:https://www.kwh40.de/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/KWH40-Standpunkt-fml40-Version-1.0.pdf
[6]: https://wiki.eclipse.org/BaSyx_/_Documentation_/_AssetAdministrationShell
[7]: https://www.w3.org/WoT/documentation/
