Ontology-Based Semantic Reasoning for Multisource Heterogeneous Industrial Devices Using OPC UA

The advent of smart manufacturing in Industry 4.0 signifies the era of connections. As a communication protocol, object linking and embedding for process control unified architecture (OPC UA) can address most semantic heterogeneity issues. However, its semantics are not formally defined at the application layer. To address the information silo problem caused by semantic heterogeneity, an integration framework named querying of ontology mapping-based OPC UA (QOMOU) is proposed. QOMOU extracts information models of OPC UA servers into resource description framework triples and utilizes Web Ontology Language for semantic enrichment and inference. Then, an event class semantic similarity calculation (ECSSC) method is proposed for device-type identification, enabling the classification of semantically heterogeneous OPC UA devices. The effectiveness of ECSSC is validated through queries with the RDF query language (SPARQL) protocol in Apache Jena. Experimental results demonstrate that ECSSC improves the accuracy of device identification by approximately 7% compared to benchmark device identification models. Specifically, compared with graph embedding-based methods, QOMOU’s query performance is approximately 13% higher, and its query efficiency is 5% higher on average compared to both structured query and extensible markup languages. Moreover, by employing a keyword-matching algorithm, the query accuracy of the existing heterogeneous data integration scheme is improved by 4% on average. This enhancement can boost the operational efficiency of Internet of Things systems based on the OPC UA architecture.