Semantic Web Solutions in Engineering

The Industrie 4.0 vision highlights the need for more flexible and adaptable production systems. This requires making the process of engineering production systems faster and intends to lead to higher quality, but also more complex plants. A key issue in improving engineering processes in this direction is providing mechanisms that can efficiently and intelligently handle large-scale and heterogeneous engineering data sets thus shortening engineering processes while ensuring a higher quality of the engineered system, for example, by enabling improved cross-disciplinary defect detection mechanisms. Semantic Web technologies (SWTs) have been widely used for the development of a range of Intelligent Engineering Applications (IEAs) that exhibit an intelligent behavior when processing large and heterogeneous data sets. This chapter identifies key technical tasks performed by IEAs, provides example IEAs and discusses the connection between Semantic Web capabilities and IEA tasks.