Ontology-Based Device Descriptions and Device Repository for Building Automation Devices

Device descriptions play an important role in the design and commissioning of modern building automation systems and help reducing the design time and costs. However, all established device descriptions are specialized for certain purposes and suffer from several weaknesses. This hinders a further design automation, which is strongly needed for the more and more complex building automation systems. To overcome these problems, this paper presents novel Ontology-based Device Descriptions (ODDs) along with a layered ontology architecture, a specific ontology view approach with virtual properties, a generic access interface, a triple store-based database backend, and a generic search mask GUI with underlying query generation algorithm. It enables a formal, unified, and extensible specification of building automation devices, ensures their comparability, and facilitates a computer-enabled retrieval, selection, and interoperability evaluation, which is essential for an automated design. The scalability of the approach to several ten thousand devices is demonstrated.

[1]  Nigel Shadbolt,et al.  Resource Description Framework (RDF) , 2009 .

[2]  Klaus Kabitzsch,et al.  Automated design of room automation systems by using an evolutionary optimization method , 2009, 2009 IEEE Conference on Emerging Technologies & Factory Automation.

[3]  Hoe-Kyung Jung,et al.  Device Description Repository System Based on DDR Simple API , 2009, J. Inform. and Commun. Convergence Engineering.

[4]  Vassilis Christophides,et al.  Benchmarking Database Representations of RDF/S Stores , 2005, SEMWEB.

[5]  Sören Auer,et al.  Control on RDF Triple Stores from a Semantik Wiki Perspective , 2006 .

[6]  Vassilis Christophides,et al.  Viewing the Semantic Web through RVL Lenses , 2003, SEMWEB.

[7]  Klaus Kabitzsch,et al.  Generic specification toolchain for ontology-based Device Descriptions , 2010, 2010 IEEE 15th Conference on Emerging Technologies & Factory Automation (ETFA 2010).

[8]  Vassilis Christophides,et al.  Viewing the semantic web through RVL lenses , 2004, J. Web Semant..

[9]  Kurt Rohloff,et al.  An Evaluation of Triple-Store Technologies for Large Data Stores , 2007, OTM Workshops.

[10]  Kajal T. Claypool,et al.  CLOVE: A Framework to Design Ontology Views , 2004, ER.

[11]  Klaus Kabitzsch,et al.  Ontology-based Device Descriptions and triple store based device repository for automation devices , 2010, 2010 IEEE 15th Conference on Emerging Technologies & Factory Automation (ETFA 2010).

[12]  Mark A. Musen,et al.  Specifying Ontology Views by Traversal , 2004, International Semantic Web Conference.

[13]  E. Prud hommeaux,et al.  SPARQL query language for RDF , 2011 .

[14]  Z. Meral Özsoyoglu,et al.  A complete translation from SPARQL into efficient SQL , 2009, IDEAS '09.

[15]  Klaus Kabitzsch,et al.  A semantic Requirement Ontology for the engineering of building automation systems by means of OWL , 2009, 2009 IEEE Conference on Emerging Technologies & Factory Automation.