Automatic Mapping of AutomationML Files to Ontologies for Graph Queries and Validation
This addresses the problem of limited tool applicability for engineers and practitioners in the automation domain, offering a novel mapping approach but is incremental in extending existing standards.
The paper tackled the limitation of common XML tools for querying and validating AutomationML files by transforming them into OWL, enabling new use cases with SPARQL and SHACL. A study on automation domain examples concluded that this transformation opens up powerful querying and validation methods previously impossible.
AutomationML has seen widespread adoption as an open data exchange format in the automation domain. It is an open and vendor neutral standard based on the extensible markup language XML. However, AutomationML extends XML with additional semantics that limit the applicability of common XML-tools for applications like querying or data validation. This article demonstrates how the transformation of AutomationML into OWL enables new use cases in querying with SPARQL and validation with SHACL. To support this, it provides practitioners with (1) an up-to-date ontology of the concepts defined in the AutomationML standard and (2) a declarative mapping to automatically transform any AutomationML model into RDF triples. A study on examples from the automation domain concludes that transforming AutomationML to OWL opens up new powerful ways for querying and validation that would have been impossible without this transformation.