RSCDF: A Dynamic and Context-Sensitive Metadata Description Framework for Industrial Resources

Emerging Semantic Web technology offered the Resource Description Framework (RDF) as a standard for semantic annotation of Web resources. It is expected that Web content with RDF-based metadata layer and ontological basis for it will be enough to enable interoperable and automated processing of Web data by various applications. However emerging industrial applications consider e.g. machines, processes, personnel, services for condition monitoring, remote diagnostics and maintenance, etc. to be specific classes of Web resources and thus a subject for semantic annotation. Such resources are naturally dynamic, not only from the point of view of changing values for some attributes (state of resource) but also from the point of view of changing “status-labels” (condition of the resource). In this paper we present Resource State/Condition Description Framework (RSCDF), as an extension to RDF, which introduces upper-ontology for describing such characteristics of resources as states and correspondent conditions, dynamics of state changes, target conditions and historical data about previous states. These descriptions are supposed to be used by external Web-services (e.g. condition monitoring, remote diagnostics and predictive maintenance of the resources). We present RSCDF as temporal and contextual extensions of RDF and discuss a State-Symptom-DiagnosisDecision-Maintenance model as the basis for RSCDF schema. Then we present RSCDF schema itself and show some examples.