Transforming OPC UA Information Models into Domain-Specific Ontologies

Semantics interoperability is important for cyber-physical systems to enable complex data processing and facilitating interworking. OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) provides an extensible information model but lacks formal semantics. Ontologies based on the Web Ontology Language (OWL) can provide such formal semantics. Thus, we present a transformation approach that converts OPC UA information models (or only parts of them) into domain-specific ontologies. The transformation process consists of two steps. The first step is a mapping from OPC UA to OWL Full. The second step performs a graph transformation, based on SPARQL rules, into the domain-specified target ontology. The adaption of this transformation to the source information model and the target ontology can be accomplished by only adapting these transformation rules. The presented approach is evaluated for a use case of an industrial heating process to show its flexibility.