SAREF4INMA: a SAREF extension for the Industry and Manufacturing domain

Tracking #: 2218-3431

Authors: 
Mike de Roode
Laura Daniele
Alba Fernández-Izquierdo
Maria Poveda
Raúl García-Castro

Responsible editor: 
Guest Editors SemWeb of Things for Industry 4.0 - 2019

Submission type: 
Ontology Description
Abstract: 
The IoT landscape is characterized by a fragmentation of standards, platforms and technologies, often scattered among different vertical domains. To prevent the market to continue to be fragmented and power-less, a protocol-independent semantic layer can serve as enabler of interoperability among the various smart devices from different manufacturers that co-exist in a specific industry domain, but also across different domains. To that end, the SAREF ontology was created in 2015 with the intention to interconnect data, enabling the communication between IoT devices that use different protocols and standards. A number of industrial sectors consequently expressed their interest to extend SAREF into their domains in order to fill the gaps of the semantics not yet covered by their communication protocols. Therefore, the SAREF4INMA ontology was recently created to extend SAREF for describing the Smart Industry & Manufacturing domain. SAREF4INMA is based on several standards and IoT initiatives, as well as on real use cases, and includes classes, properties and instances specifically created to cover the industry and manufacturing domain. This work describes the approach followed to develop this ontology, specifies its requirements and also includes a practical example of how to use it.
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Decision/Status: 
Major Revision

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Review #1
Anonymous submitted on 05/Aug/2019
Suggestion:
Minor Revision
Review Comment:

This manuscript has been submitted as an 'Ontology Description'. The authors describe the development of the extension of the SAREF ontology for the industry and manufacturing domain namely, SAREF4INMA. The paper is well-written and comprehensive in its presentation. The ontology itself is presented in detail along with instantiation examples that further aid in the understanding and application of the ontology.

The introduction and related work sections together present a clear background and the motivation for developing an ontology for the industry and manufacturing domain and consequently, extending SAREF as SAREF4INMA. Further, the related work section argues for the need of SAREF4INMA by highlighting the gaps and limitations of existing ontologies. The ontology development process and the methodology it is based on are both well-explained. The authors have succinctly outlined the use-case and non-onotlogical resources (standards) used for initial requirements gathering and reuse. The concepts in SAREF4INMA are described in detail in the implementation section helped further by corresponding illustrations depicting class inheritance and relationships between the classes.

My suggestion for revision is for the evaluation section, which is very brief with only the results of the ontology design using OOPS! mentioned. While this evaluation is indeed important and necessary, the section would benefit from the addition of evaluation results showing the extent to which the ontology is fulfilling the requirements or in other words, the coverage of the ontology.

The paper would also benefit from proof-reading to correct few typing errors such as:
Page 8, line 46: "...figure below shows..." --> "...Figure 6 shows..."
Page 12, line 33: "As mention in previous sections..." --> "As mentioned in previous sections..."

Review #2
By Kouji Kozaki submitted on 06/Aug/2019
Suggestion:
Major Revision
Review Comment:

This parker describes an ontology, named SAREF for Industry and Manufacturing (SAREF4INMA), for the industry and manufacturing domain.
It is developed as an extension of the the Smart Applications REFerence ontology (SAREF) ontology which created to interconnect data, enabling the communication between IoT devices.

The ontology was developed through the LOT (Linked Open Terms) methodology which includes some steps such as ontology requirement specification, ontology implementation, ontology publication, ontology maintenance.
Though this paper gives good overview of the LOT methodology with how the authors applied the methodology to their domain, it is not enough clear what is key issues to develop the ontology.

I could understand that the authors show some concepts which were not covered in the existing ontology.
However, I cannot understand there were any issues or difficulties to overcome for define/impalement these concepts in the ontology. In other words, this paper looks like that it just introduces added concepts without consideration about ontology design issues or new ideas for ontology developments.
I guess that the authors have some experiences about such issues through their ontology development processes. The authors should consider to discuss about that.

The followings some topics that should be discussed in this paper.

- Some concepts are defined in the proposed ontology. Could you show some statistical information such as the numbers of classes, properties, axioms, etc. in comparison to the existing ontology. I think it is more informative if it is shown according to kinds of concepts.

-"Batch" looks like one of very important concept in the proposed ontology. Though definitions/implementations of some kinds of “Batch” are explained, the author should discuss about design issues and/or design policy for these concepts from not domain knowledge but ontology engineering viewpoints.

-In section 4.1, two cycles are introduced as concepts especially needed. How these concepts are defined in the ontology?

-Section 6 discusses that some topics and categories to be out of scope in the proposed ontology. Could you give the reason? I think that it could be valuable information for the reader so that study some ontology development decisions.