Semantic Web for Advanced Engineering

Semantic Web technologies support intelligent, web-scale data integration and, as such, enable a wide range of advanced applications. Therefore, these technologies have been successfully employed in various areas, ranging from pharmacology to library science and e-business. A comparatively slower adoption of Semantic Web technologies happened in multi-disciplinary engineering settings. Particularly the complexity of multi-disciplinary engineering settings hampers a straightforward adoption of standard Semantic Web solutions. With the advent of the Industrie 4.0 movement, there is a renewed need and interest in realising flexible and intelligent engineering solutions, which could be enabled with Semantic Web technologies.

In this timely context, this talk focuses on how Semantic Web technologies can be used to support multi-disciplinary engineering settings, which are typical when creating Cyber-Physical Production Systems, the key enablers of the Industrie 4.0 revolution. Drawing on several years of experience in using Semantic Web technologies for creating flexible automation systems with industry partners as part of the CDL-Flex research lab, this talk will identify those aspects of Industrie 4.0 that can be improved with Semantic Web technologies and subsequently show how these technologies need to be adapted to and applied in the particular settings of multi-disciplinary engineering domains. A selection of case studies from various engineering domains will demonstrate how Semantic Web solutions can support intelligent applications, such as defect detection and constraint checking.

Dr Marta Sabou is a Senior Researchers at the Vienna University of Technology, where she leads a group of researchers in the area of semantic representation and integration of engineering data in the context of automation systems. Prior to this, she was an Assistant Professor at the Department of New Media Technology and a Research Fellow at the Knowledge Media Institute, Open University. She holds a PhD from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, for which she received the IEEE Intelligent System’s Ten to Watch Award (2006). She established herself as a core member of the Semantic Web community already during her PhD and then continued to work in this area and publish in the best conferences (WWW, Int. Semantic Web Conferences) and journals (Journal of Web Semantics, IEEE Intelligent Systems.). She has investigated several topics related to Semantic Web research ranging from ontology engineering tasks (ontology creation, mapping, modularisation) to the creation of intelligent systems that benefit from semantic information in domains as varied as tourism, climate change or open government. Her current interest is on data integration issues, with a special focus on the domain of industrial automation and Industry 4.0. She takes an active role in the Semantic Web research community. She acts as an editorial board member for three journals that publish Semantic Web research (SWJ, IJSWIS, JoDS) and has been engaged in several senior conference organization activities, including: WebScience Track co-chair at WWW’16; Resources Track co-chair at ISWC’16 and program co-chair for ESWC’15 and iSemantics’2013.