Semantics in Industrial Distributed Systems

Abstract Industrial distributed systems aim at robust and flexible control of industrial processes, for which the traditional centralized approaches are not sufficient. The general problem of distributed systems is that they are still tightly coupled from the point of view of system integration and are still far from openness that would enable cooperation at a larger scale without any human intervention. To achieve better operation and integration in an open reconfigurable environment, explicit semantics is needed to capture the meaning during communication. Relevant research area is the field of ontologies and semantic web. We show how semantics can be employed in industrial systems, in particular in distributed agent-based systems, and especially using semantic web research. We review current state of the art and, based on our own experience, we discuss potentials and challenges as well as differences and similarities of applications of semantics and ontologies in industrial systems when compared to WWW oriented research.