Principles and risk assessment of managing distributed ontologies hosted by embedded devices for controlling industrial systems

Industry is continuously moving towards the employment and exploitation of semantic technologies due to diverse enterprise needs, such as cross-domain interoperability, system modeling, categorization of information, model validation and data reasoning. Therefore, the research community presents new semantic-based approaches for implementing industrial systems that are more flexible, self-descriptive, dynamic and interoperable with other systems that are already deployed in the field. For example, the World Wide Web Consortium standards may be employed for linking remote resources. Currently, researchers claim that there is already a great success on implementing cyber-physical systems and efficient machine-to-machine and machine-to-human interactions through semantics. However, presented solutions are not always validated in terms of security. This article suggests two techniques: threat modeling and risk assessment for protecting solutions from attacks and malicious access. In addition, these techniques permit reconsidering the architecture of common semantic-based solutions by finding requirements not predicted during design phase. Moreover, this research illustrates the application of aforementioned techniques within a case of study. The study case is focused on a semantic-based solution which handles manufacturing processes through cyber-physical systems.