OWL based information agent services for process monitoring

To determine the operational situation of a monitored industrial process, an operator needs efficient access to a wide range of information. Measurement data alone does not encapsulate the overall situation, but pieces of information have to be searched from different plant IT systems that unfortunately often have varying interfaces and data formats. Information agent and semantic Web techniques address similar challenges in the context of the Internet by annotating heterogeneous data with formal semantics provided by ontology languages like OWL, and by providing human users with autonomous assistants for information retrieval. This paper presents an agent based concept for process automation that provides operators with easily configured information retrieval and monitoring services, releasing them from tedious data harvesting tasks.