Mastering the digitalization challenge requires enterprises to radically innovate. Data, information and knowledge become increasingly important assets for realizing innovative digital business models and services. In order to create an enterprise data innovation architecture, which facilitates the rapid and agile creation of novel and unforeseen use cases we need to establish a common understanding as well as interoperability and accessibility of data and knowledge. To establish such a common understanding of the structure and meaning of data among individuals, departments, value chains or industries we must leverage vocabularies, Linked Data, knowledge graphs or Semantic Data Lakes to facilitate innovate data-driven use cases and enterprise agility. As a result data can be seamlessly exchanged in a secure way between trustworthy parties in the enterprise and value chain to increase agility, efficiency, effectiveness and ultimately realize the potential of digitization.
In this talk, we will discuss a digital maturity model, which empowers enterprises to proceed on a step-wise path for increasing their digital readiness. A key pillar of increasing the digital maturity of an organization is to shift from an application-centric view to a more value centric view. Value centricity can be interpreted as putting people, products, processes and partners in the focus. A promising approach for realizing this vision are digital twins, which capture all relevant data, information and knowledge. Semantic technologies, such as vocabularies, ontologies, Linked Data and knowledge graphs are ideal candidates for realizing such digital twins.
We will present the results of deploying semantic technologies in enterprise and industrial use cases in particular in the context of the International Data Space initiative and from the H2020 BOOST 4.0 project comprising 50 partners including automotive, manufacturing and appliance companies such as VW, Volvo, Philips or Whirlpool. We will showcase the BOOST4.0 core ontology as well as its integration with related standards and semantic models, such as the RAMI Reference Model for Industry 4.0, ScorVoc, which provides a semantic model of the APICS Supply Chain Council's SCOR vocabulary or the Administrative Shell for Industry 4.0. With VoCol, we present an environment for the agile and collaborative creation of vocabularies and semantic models using Git and a number of integrated services for documentation generation, evolution tracking, visualization and querying. VoCol thus enables an agile iterative form of interoperability assurance thus catering for the requirements of a sustainable digital transformation. We will present examples of semantic information models used in practice for governing the information exchange as well as analytical applications.
Professor and director
Leibniz Information Center for Science & Technology
https://www.tib.eu/en/
Following stations at the universities of Dresden, Ekaterinburg, Leipzig, Pennsylvania, Bonn and the Fraunhofer Society, Prof. Auer was appointed Professor of Data Science and Digital Libraries at Leibniz Universität Hannover and Director of the TIB in 2017. Prof. Auer has made important contributions to semantic technologies, knowledge engineering and information systems.
