Using Properties as a Semantic Base for Interoperability

Information exchange requires a common semantic understanding of the meaning of the exchanged data by the involved communication partners. Properties with a predefined and standardized meaning are one pillar of such an information exchange. Another pillar is the exchange of information about relationships between semantic entities by an appropriate system description metamodel. In this paper, we focus on the information exchange of property value expressions. Within the last years, domain-specific lists of properties have been standardized. The development was driven by the need to exchange information of industrial products electronically. The standardized lists allow an unambiguous characterization of products. Results of this comprehensive work done by the standardization committees within the last years are, for example, the international standard series IEC 61360CDD, IEC 61987, and the property library eCl@ss. In these standards, thousands of properties of technical assets are semantically defined. An intuitive and general concept to use these standardized properties for information exchange is crucial for the future system design. One recent approach is the so-called property value statement model. In this paper, the basic concepts of this approach are presented. Additionally, methods to reason about property information in a general way are discussed. The presented concepts fit to the standardized property definition models and build a platform for a metadata-based information handling in the digital factory.