Semantic Web Services for Smart Devices in a "Global Understanding Environment"

Various Web resources and services are usually assumed to be used and accessed by human users (current Web) or by software agents on behalf of human users (emerging Semantic Web). However industry emerges also a new group of “users”, which are smart industrial devices, robots or any other objects, which can be adapted to the (Semantic) Web environment. They would need special services for e.g. online condition monitoring, information provisioning, remote diagnostics, maintenance support, etc. The goal of this paper is to specify main requirements to Web services that automatically follow up and predict the performance and maintenance needs of field devices. Semantic Web enabled services form a Service Network based on internal and external service platforms and OntoShell software. Concepts of a “Global Understanding Environment” and a “mobile service component” suppose that any component can be adapted to Semantic Web environment and executed at any platform from the Service Network, including service requestor side. This allows delivering not only a service results but also a service itself. Mobile service component within an OntoShell (agent) can move to a field device’s local environment (embedded agent platform) and perform its activities locally. Service components improve their performance through online learning and communication with other components. Heterogeneous service components’ discovery is based on semantic P2P search.