Semantic Technologies in Automation Systems

Semantic technologies are currently on the advent in Industrial Informatics. They provide data standards with formal syntax and semantics to define and exchange knowledge in a machine interpretable way, thus ensuring the interoperability of the exchanged data. They are perfectly suitable for domain modeling, classification, semantic search, and deriving new insights by reasoning. Expressiveness and flexibility coupled with verifiable structure make semantic technologies a key to overcome common modeling, model exchange, and interoperability problems that need to be solved across the life cycle to automate the automation of future automation systems. This results in an increasing application of semantic technologies to automation systems with a wide usage in industrial processes, factory automation, smart buildings, and global sensor networks. This Special Section addresses this field of automation systems and presents novel research in the field of semantic technologies that demonstrate new capabilities in Industrial Informatics.