In the future scenario of Industrial 4.0 and IoT, information exchange could be totally different from what it is now. The current data integration approaches that need large-scale human intervention will not be suitable in such application contexts. Considering the fact that vast and heterogeneous data exists in future, traditional human-based approaches may need to deal with large amount of information every day, which would result in huge human resources to be consumed. Hence developing ontology based approach that can properly handle the complex and unstructured big data seems to be a promising trend in the future scenario of Industrial 4.0. Ontology is an indispensable ingredient for such applications: ontology contains core concepts as well as the relationships between the concepts within the domain of discourse; also the syntax and semantics of ontology is both human-readable and machine-interpretable to enable effective communication not only between people, but also between machines. In this context, ontology-based approach becomes a perfect candidate due to its abilities in tackling these problems.
Useful Links
J-Park Simulator, A Part of The World Avatar Project
Cambridge Centre for Advanced Research and Education in Singapore (CARES)
Computational Modelling Group, University of Cambridge
OntoCAPE, A large-scale ontology for chemical process engineering