Enterprise Interoperability VIII

We report on work in capturing cybersecurity requirements for cloud-based and IoT-enabled multi-sided platforms (MSPs). Our approach is designed to capture security aspects related to business rules and constraints of MSPs, thus shaping the platform’s behaviour and the participants’ interaction and leading towards safer enterprise interoperability. We design the MSPs Privacy Requirements Framework and the MSPs Security Architecture, in order to cater for specific use case-centric and platform-centric cybersecurity requirements. To ensure compliance with the upcoming GDPR, we discuss the mapping between elicited cybersecurity requirements and GDPR rules. The new GDPR is expected to have significant implications on businesses in the EU, and our approach is designed to achieve full compliance with it.

An early warning system (EWS) is a distributed system that monitors the physical world and issues warnings if it detects abnormal situations. The Internet of Things (IoT) offers opportunities to improve monitoring capabilities of EWS and to realize (near) real-time warning and response. This paper presents the development of an interoperable IoT-based EWS to detect accident risks with trucks that deliver goods at the Valencia port area. Our solution addresses the semantic integration of a variety of data sources with processing in safety-critical applications for effective emergency response. The solution considers existing domain-specific ontologies and standards, along with their serialization formats. Accident risks are assessed by monitoring the drivers’ vital signs with ECG medical wearables and the trucks’ position with speed and accelerometer data. Use cases include the detection of health issues and vehicle collision with dangerous goods. This EWS is developed with the SEMIoTICS framework, which encompasses a model-driven architecture that guides the application of data representations, transformations, and distributed software components. This framework enables an EWS to act as a semantic broker for situation-aware decision support.

Industry 4.0 is reshaping the manufacturing industry. Through Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and cloud computing, manufacturing orientated interoperability ecosystems allow companies to reinvent the use of manufacturing data in value creation. Cybersecurity is a critical aspect in the design of these interoperability platforms to ensure safety in manufacturing operations. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) allows to control the network architecture and behavior in a programmatic way, thus enabling innovative cybersecurity concepts that can be applied to manufacturing orientated interoperability ecosystems. The Virtual Factory Open Operating System (vf-OS) is an innovative multi-sided platform designed to enable collaboration between manufacturing companies. The vf-OS Holistic Security and Privacy Concept incorporates the latest standards and technologies to enable interoperability with industrial control systems (ICS) in the vf-OS ecosystem. This paper uses this state-of-the-art security concept to describe the role of SDN in securing manufacturing oriented interoperability ecosystems and presents an innovative proposal to further improve cybersecurity using SDN technology.

The digital revolution results in changes in the production and value-added processes, which is a challenge especially for SMEs who cannot keep up with the rapid pace of technology development. This is mainly due to the lack of know-how and lack of strategies to lead one’s own company into the fourth industrial revolution as well as high investment costs in industry 4.0 solutions with unclear benefits. The increased amount of data in production systems together with the increasing networking of all systems offer new possibilities for quality assurance and quality management, though. The main objective of Industry 4.0 out of the box is to enable manufacturing SMEs to carry out the individual tracking of value creation with minimal planning and implementation costs. Industry 4.0 out of the box contains all necessary hardware and software for flexible tracking of production and testing parameters at part level and the collection of order-specific parameters without disrupting normal production.

Nowadays information systems need to be open and communicative across their environment. However, the processes that hold the enterprise applications often have a heterogeneity and a technological complexity which makes the task of re-engineering difficult and costly. In this paper, we adopted a robotic process automation approach for deploying a software automated interoperability framework according to an event-driven architecture. The robot is an agent able to analyze a graphical interface of any application in order to retrieve meaningful information and produce an adequate action. Once the action reaches the interoperability framework, the event will be interpreted according to the capability of the involved robots. The study is useful in fraud detection as well as risk assessment.

The condition-based maintenance (CBM) strategy has got new, powerful toolset recently: the concepts of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). These can provide flexible but powerful data collection and analysis methods for proactive and predictive maintenance. In the landscape of new digitalization and interconnection of products, services, processes, enterprises and people, IoT/CPS-based platforms are increasing in their size and target applications in a steady manner. Beside the fundamental research challenges regarding the reference architecture, interoperability, performance, quality and deployment issues, the challenges regarding system maintenance are also burning. There are various issues that are specific to the maintenance domain: interoperability and data flow management, data representation models, and data processing models and tools. The paper describes a maintenance reference architecture and platform, which aims to tackle all these challenges. The architecture suggested by the MANTIS project covers edge and cloud level interoperability, data flow management and data processing issues. Furthermore, it provides domain-specific methods for root cause analysis, failure prediction and models for predicting remaining useful life. The architecture is strengthened by the concept of MIMOSA, a data model definition that allows data representation models that are easy to fit into relational object and information management models required by CBM. The MANTIS platform utilizes the Arrowhead framework for tackling interoperability and integrability issues.

The ICT infrastructure of many manufacturing companies usually is composed of mixed or what is sometimes referred to as heterogeneous systems or platforms. This trend continues with the development of digital manufacturing platforms that are built around vendor-specific technologies or closed standards. This paper introduces a platform interoperability framework that aims to promote transparency across different levels of digital platforms. The framework supports the development of interoperable solutions and creation of an ecosystem where applications and services that can be deployed across multiple platforms. The data gathered from the study highlight the interoperability potential among different levels of the digital platforms. The usefulness of the framework is evident in not only promoting transparency across domain-specific platforms but also identifying potential for collaborations and ecosystem creations.

Cloud collaborative manufacturing networks (C2NET), European H2020 funded, project has three main areas of research, including data collection, optimisation and collaboration tools. The three modules are integrated in the C2NET cloud platform. This paper focuses on the C2NET optimiser module that gathers a collection of algorithms to address enterprise’ plans, which range from replenishment to delivery through manufacturing. The algorithms are designed considering a standardised data model, making the optimisation planning an interoperable process between the enterprises and the C2NET cloud platform. The first and second tiers of an automotive supply chain take part in C2NET project, and the specificities of automotive industries are identified. In this regard, the need of computing the injection moulding-sequencing plan. In order to fulfil the requirements of the automotive pilot, an optimisation algorithm is designed and presented as a proof of concept about the interoperable characteristics of the designed algorithms.

The rapid evolution of the means of communication has led to the multiplication of collaboration tools that are constantly evolving and are now indispensable and introduced as a daily practice of all employees. Enterprises have become aware of the need and the importance of these productivity tools. As such, OpenPaaS::NG is an open-source, interoperable, scalable, extensible enterprise collaboration platform that aims to remove internal collaboration barriers, promote digital openness, and to reduce the gap between the new communication trends of the daily life and the outdated usage of software in business. It also includes artificial intelligence-based recommendation system in order to provide advanced real-time contextual recommendations for meetings’ participants. In this paper, we report the work resulting from our involvement in several research projects and we present the main features of the OpenPaaS::NG platform.

We present a method to create semantic representations of cascading risks of interoperable socio-technical systems. This is based on a structured domain ontology representing socio-technical systems, their interdependencies, environmental and anthropic hazards, and the related threats. The ontology is accompanied by a software application, i.e., the CREAtivity Machine that generates cascades of risks by means of semantic and computational creativity techniques. The presented running prototype refers to risk assessment of critical infrastructures; however, the same method can be applied to risks concerning other system types like businesses, ecosystems, and financial networks.

In the context of globalization and knowledge management, information technologies require an ample need of unprecedented levels of data exchange and sharing to allow collaboration between heterogeneous systems. Yet, understanding the semantics of the exchanged data is one of the major challenges. Semantic interoperability can be ensured by capturing knowledge from diverse sources by using ontologies and align these latter by using upper-level ontologies to come up with a common shared vocabulary. In this paper, we aim in one hand to investigate the role of upper-level ontologies as a mean for enabling the formalization and integration of heterogeneous sources of information and how it may support interoperability of systems. On the other hand, we present several upper-level ontologies and how we chose and then used basic formal ontology (BFO) as an upper-level ontology and common core ontology (CCO) as a mid-level ontology to develop a modular ontology that defines emergency responders’ knowledge starting from firefighters’ module for a solution to the semantic interoperability problem in emergency management.

The risk and vulnerability analysis of buildings identifies buildings with high exposure to natural hazards. It is crucial to prevent or reduce damage and economic loss for the construction and property management industry. The government, as well as private landowners, benefit from risk and vulnerability assessment of their real estate portfolio. In this paper, we propose a semantic-enhanced method to simplify the risk and vulnerability assessment process and improve interoperability of real estate and natural hazards data. The method relies on the publication and integration of data from various sources as linked data. Visualization of the integrated data is also presented, together with application scenarios.

Industrial production’s main goal is to achieve adaptability, resource efficiency, as well as, to integrate the complete value and supply chains, including customers, in business and value processes. To this end, manufacturing systems need to be as generic as possible in order to answer the different needs of a variety of industries. Industry4.0 paradigm stands as the baseline to answer these requirements, and data collection capabilities represent a major pillar in this strategy. Moreover, the way companies interact and communicate, being able of sharing information among themselves as well as to take full advantage of the data and knowledge being generated (even within the same company) demand huge attention to solving interoperability issues. The C2NET project (Cloud Collaborative Manufacturing Networks project), intends to implement the Industry 4.0 vision aiming to provide a cloud-based platform for managing the company interactions and promoting enterprise interoperability. This paper presents how the Data Collection Framework (DCF) developed within C2NET project can be used to collect data and support an automatic non-conformity detection case in a Portuguese metalworking SME. The developed components are briefly described as well as the implemented use case. The results obtained are also presented and discussed.

The ISO 16300-3 standard considers the required artefacts for interoperability verification and validation throughout the whole cycle of manufacturing application development. In this chapter, an important work of ISO series standards has been elaborated in the context of manufacturing application development. The current work presents the ISO 16300-3 main guidelines devoted to the verification and validation of software unit’s interoperability for the manufacturing software units which can be considered as the most critical part of any automated manufacturing process. The various proposals of ISO 16300-3 are individually detailed to some extent showing its pertinence for a systematic verification and validation of manufacturing software units interoperability.

The main objective of any test process is to check the functionality, reliability and operational safety of products. Recent developments resulted in a wide range of highly specialized test procedure languages. In addition to the heterogeneity between test procedure languages, the different versions of the same test language are also heterogeneous. To make test procedures exchangeable between enterprises and reusable, testers face the challenging task of effectively decoupling the test procedure descriptions from specific test tools as well as test benches. This paper presents an approach to achieve the interoperability of test procedure languages which envisages an intermediate representation. An appropriate intermediate representation is the enabler for the application of data integration solutions. The goal is to make test procedures interoperable and to enable transformation definitions for cross-compiling. The developed intermediate representation uses the State Machine Notation for Control Abstraction (SCXML) to represent all test procedure language features. The paper demonstrates how to transform a test procedure from Check Case Definition Language (CCDL) into SCXML. Moreover, the capabilities and restrictions of this approach are shown and summarized.

Acquiring new knowledge and skills is the principal goal of any educational institution. Universities planned always to improve the learning methods to offer high academic competencies qualities for students. These competencies help students to respond to the needs of companies’ missions during their internships. In some cases, some companies’ missions required more competencies in a special domain activity. Therefore, we proposed our method based on a continuous learning ontology where a student can do his job with the support and assistance of a specific service or from his supervisor. This ontology will permit to take into consideration, in addition to competencies, the abilities of students to ensure interoperability between company and university by ensuring matching between the actual student skills and required mission skills. Thus, the proposed approach will establish an efficiency matching between the company needs and the students. Results show the benefits of such an approach to resolving the gap between industry needs and students’ skills.

Enterprises are complex systems comprising three fundamental components: a physical sub-system, a decision sub-system, and an information sub-system. Humans in the enterprises are not just resources but the first consumers and providers of data, information, and knowledge. The present research considers enterprise as a technical system embedding social component. Socio-cyber-physical systems naturally embody this idea. The research considers such systems as an enterprise component that combines the cyber aspects of computing and communications with the dynamics and physics of physical enterprise. The enterprise interoperability problem is treated as the problem of service interoperability in socio-cyber-physical systems at the service level and process level of an enterprise. The research proposes ontologies of enterprise and socio-cyber-physical system, a task-oriented service interoperability model, and a service communication mechanism.

The problems of creating lifecycle ontologies for enterprise interoperability are addressed in this paper. Enterprise interoperability and enterprise integration are essential components of enterprise engineering (EE). A few definitions and viewpoints on EE are examined in the first hand. An original discipline for EE is considered. A generalized ontological approach to enterprise engineering is developed on the basis of combination of the lifecycle modeling, knowledge management and ontological engineering. It calls for the modeling and coordination of at least three lifecycles: enterprise lifecycle, knowledge lifecycle and product lifecycle. A general representation of lifecycle knowledge graph by a mind map is given. Particular emphasis is put on granular lifecycle upper ontology and meta-ontology. The lifecycle representations being discussed include both visualized and abstract ones. Allen’s logic is used to construct principle temporal relations between stages and phases of lifecycle.

The advanced development of blockchain technologies at present is to have external applications that interact with the native blockchain. A smart contract allows us to insert business logic which can add transactions and share them with multiple parties. This paper discusses the development process of a smart contract platform that aims to generate smart contracts for heterogeneous blockchain technologies. We start the process of creating a blueprint design, a datalogical stereotype that employs the ontology design from a Resources-Event-Agent (REA) perspective (McCarthy in The Accounting Review, LVII(3) (1982) [1]). With the modeling approach we are using in this paper, Unified Modeling Language (UML) and Object Constraint Language (OCL), we implement the workflow and algorithm in a supply chain demo sample [2].

Within the context of implementing decentralized energy markets, it is necessary to integrate existing structures into this process of change and let established participants play an active role in it. The problem of the conversion is the way how the current, and sometimes still rigid, accounting systems can be adjusted to a flexible and adaptable energy market. It should be noted that today’s ordinary consumer must have the ability to feed energy into the grid, thereby taking a prosumer role. This article describes a concept developed within the context of the WindNode project to address this problem. The concept includes an approach focused on billing processes to realize a decentralized energy market. Attention was paid to scalability, flexibility, business process modeling and security. The result describes an approach to how any participant can be integrated into such a network, whether as an ordinary consumer or as a prosumer.

Data sharing is important to optimize and manage logistics chains. Open standards have been developed and implemented by various logistics stakeholders. These implementations have led to closed solutions with barriers to change and implement innovative concepts like synchromodality. This paper analyzes the implementation of open standards by providing an overview of available open standards based on different implementation strategies for logistics. It reflects the state of the art of business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-government (B2G) interoperability in international trade and logistics. An analysis of the underlying problem and a proposal for a solution to create a system-of-systems for data sharing in supply and logistics with key elements of the Industrial Data Space are presented in this paper.

Supply chain performance mainly depends on how well are defined and managed their inter-enterprise business processes. For that purpose, performance management systems should consider inter-organisational processes in their structures as well as be defined at two levels: intra-enterprise and inter-enterprise. In the literature, several performance management systems already developed consider to some extent business processes management. However, the introduction of inter-organisational business process interoperability measurement is still an issue that needs to be researched in more detail. To solve this gap, this paper presents a performance management system for inter-organisational contexts that integrates business process interoperability measurement. In addition, an application of this system is shown for the agri-food supply chain.

The issue of interoperability is even more present in the building sector as the building is a complex object. Building Information Modelling (BIM) is a shared knowledge resource for information about a facility as a building. The diversity of actors involved and the very long life cycle of the building decrease the ability to solve identified problems. When tackling the importance of interoperability in BIM, overviewing challenges and listing existing solutions is an important step. This work highlights the need of interoperability in BIM. A review of the state of art on encountered interoperability challenges in BIM also helps to enumerate existing solutions. Because of various factors, some of the solutions proposed need improvements. One improvement could be the enhancing of a widely used BIM-based ontology. This identification work is part of a larger project, namely MINDOC. It is a foundation for future proposals in the area of BIM for sustainable construction.

Cloud Collaborative Manufacturing Networks (C2NET) project is a European H2020 project started in January 2015. The main focus of this project is to develop a cloud platform that supports the services for the collaborative planning processes management among partners within supply chain networks. This paper presents an application of the generation and visualization of supply chain deviations. This application is based on a monitoring framework, which provides the following main functionalities: collecting data from legacy ERP systems, generating automatically models of supply chain planed and current status, detecting deviations between two statuses, and suggesting adaption processes associated to deviations and visualization of deviation assessment.

The prognostic and health management (PHM) approach aims at supporting maintenance operations in order to ensure the functionality of a system. In order to achieve this objective, a PHM approach is composed of a prognostic component, able to send a prognostic of failure, and a component able to give the health status of the system. Nowadays, this approach suffers from a lack of exploitation of the emerging technologies. This article presents a novel architecture for PHM approach able to extract added value from data. This lambda architecture embeds two layers: a speed layer and a storage layer. Thanks to the storage layer, maintenance rules can be applied as well as the result of machine learning algorithms to the speed layer in order to realize the prognostic aspect of the PHM. In addition, the system has to deal with heterogeneous data, which comes with the necessity to handle the big data issues as well as making it interoperable. This is achieved thanks to a service-oriented architecture approach and the use of complex event processing.

Since industrial maintenance is a key operation, modern manufacturing firms need to minimize maintenance losses and to improve their overall performance. In addition, emerging information technologies such as the Internet of things (IoT), cyber-physical systems, proactive computing and big data analysis in the context of Industry 4.0 are able to enhance maintenance management with the aim to implement a new maintenance strategy: proactive maintenance. To this end, we propose a unified conceptual architecture for proactive maintenance in a sensor-based industrial environment. Furthermore, we describe how we aim to implement it with the use of existing services and tools, the integration of which will result in the UPTIME information system. Finally, we present our plans for its evaluation in three industrial cases: a white goods/home appliances industry, a steel industry and an aviation industry.

The paper addresses the first one-and-a-half cycles, out of four planned, in an action research effort concerned with predictive maintenance of walls and ceilings in tunnels of hard rock underground facilities by using Internet-of-Things-enabled Rock Bolts (IoTeRB). The IoTeRB concept is developed together with a consortium of companies ranging from rock bolt manufacturers, sensor specialists, researchers, and cloud-service providers to data analysts. Thus, the action research effort is a multi-disciplinary endeavor. The result of the paper is an action plan for the second cycle concerning technology and business development which, according to the design criterion, will move the IoTeRB toward commercialization.

Business process model and notation (BPMN) is becoming the most used modeling language for business process. One of the important upgrades of BPMN 2.0 is the fact that data objects are now handling semantic elements. Nevertheless, BPMN does not enable the representation of performance measurement in the case of interoperability problems in the exchange of data objects, which remains a limitation when using BPMN to express interoperability issues in enterprise processes. We propose to extend the metamodel of BPMN in order to fill this gap. The extension, named performanceMeasurement, is defined using the BPMN extension mechanism. This new element will allow to represent performance measurement in the case of interoperability problems as well as interoperability concerns which have been solved. We illustrate the data interoperability capabilities with an example from a real industrial case.

Legacy systems modernization is one of the most common issues for enterprise organizations. As technology is changing rapidly, enterprises need to upgrade legacy systems and ensure suitable modernization. Evolving legacy systems to new ones can give new life to the existing applications; however, if the modernization process is not done correctly, it can lead to failure. Making valid decisions on the choice of modernization strategy and achieving successful evolutionary system require addressing the full modernization project life cycle. Accordingly, we propose in this paper an assessment and decisional framework for legacy systems modernization (ADF-LSM). ADF-LSM includes the main steps of migration strategy to guide the modernization process. Also it introduces quality metrics modeling at business, information systems and infrastructure levels, to assess the system and integrate the new needs of evolution. We validate the applicability of the quality metrics of the application level thorough a case study involving a control system for practically arbitrary automated vehicles. Our case study results show that the quality metrics identify well the current issues list and benefits needed to modernize a system.

Interoperability between public administrations was recognized by the European Commission (EC) with the launch of the Interchange of Data between Administrations (IDA). In 2004 the first version of the European Interoperability Framework for pan-European eGovernment Services EIF V1.0 was published followed by EIF V2.0 in 2010 and in 2017 the New EIF. This paper initially presents a summary in the landscape of interoperability, specifically a brief study on the EIF, NIFs (National Interoperability Frameworks), ISA and ISA2 (interoperability solutions for public administrations, businesses and citizens) programmes with focus on the EIF and its implementation in MS’ (member states) NIFs. How NIFs are currently utilized and what is beyond after the alignment or implementation with EIF. The description starts with some basic definitions and a review on the status of current EIF and NIFs in European countries and in several non-European countries. According to the New EIF’s principles, layers, recommendations and model a comparison is made so as to recognize major commonalities and significant differences between EIFs and principles in the NIFs. The contribution after comparison and identification of gaps provides a short summary of outcomes, recommendations and new directions mainly in relation to the outburst of current trends.

With the advance in the Internet of Things (IoT), new ways of acquiring, processing, and managing collected data from electronic devices are being developed to provide support for more complex systems. This process of transforming the acquired data from the physical world, through the sensors, into viable information on which the applications can make decisions upon, must consider the various implementation scenarios and the business and technical requirements, such as security, privacy, and interoperability between heterogeneous devices (which often communicate using different protocols and require a common vocabulary). With the increasing complexity of these requirements, it becomes urgent to develop an infrastructure to handle the associated processes and provide a middle ground layer on which the physical and digital world are connected and translated into each other. This software layer, or middleware, can be described as a hub and aims to fill the gap between devices and information systems. This work contributes with a study of mechanisms and methodologies for the collection of data, interoperability of systems and data filtering, to optimize and automate, using a lightweight approach, and the collection and pre-analysis of the data to be used by the various applications of the IoT systems, such as the SME manufacturing industries.

Open-source applications are a gold mine of potential functions for reuse. However, the difficulty lies in the identification and characterization of these functionalities to meet specific business needs. In this work, we aim to decompose and externalize functionalities from open-source business applications for service orchestration. We propose a solution for characterizing a functionality in a standardized and readable way. Then we propose an automated process based on ISO 16100 capability profile, to externalize the characterized functionalities as RESTful APIs. As a result, we expose reusable components to be used for service orchestration in response to a specific business need.

Although 99% of toy manufacturing companies are SMEs, the toy market is dominated by a limited number of massive global brands. Therefore, SMEs should enhance their current business model in a way that would give them a competitive advantage. This paper presents work from the European-funded research project ToyLabs that aims to build on this identified need to establish a new, collaborative value chain for product development in the toy industry, with business interoperability playing a key role in this quest. The methodology engages toy manufacturers, FabLabs, toy safety experts and end customers in the product design workflow to create new, safe customer-centred and market-targeted toys that are ready to be certified and put into production. For achieving the goals of this approach, the methodology behind the ToyLabs platform focuses on the incorporation of cross-sectorial business process interoperability capabilities that aim to create a common vocabulary, understanding and a communication gateway for the identification of potential partners even from sectors that were previously unrelated to the toy industry and the exchange of requirements and specifications between them.

The transformation process towards new industrial paradigms in the course of I4.0 places new demands on interoperable communication. Entities as part of cyber-physical production systems are required to interact autonomously with their environment. This can constitute a challenge for small- and medium-sized companies, since adapting existing manufacturing structures to the needs of I4.0 often involves major obstacles due to the high degree of innovation. Thus, the objective of this paper is to suggest approaches for the application of smart communication solutions to connect entities within the fully connected value network and show how components and be classified upon two criteria in order to determine whether these fulfil requirements on I4.0 applications. Especially, it provides an overview of the most forward-looking communication protocols that allow the share of information from the field level up to cloud applications and across company boundaries.

This paper presents a solution for achieving syntax interoperability between different systems. It is necessary to ensure that one system will accept data from the other systems and so to ensure efficient data exchange to work together, without changing the exchanged information. The goal of this research is to present a concrete solution of achieving syntax interoperability between existing traffic controllers and control traffic management system using DATEX II standard for Europe, based on Open Traffic Systems 2 protocol communication. The exchange of data and their intelligibility between the systems using the standard is the key for interoperability. The aim of this paper is to present how to convert binary format of data in any format which other traffic management system can understand. Syntax interoperability deals with the agreed data formats of communication so that machine-to-machine (system to system) communication can be parsed and understood by each machine (system). To achieve syntax interoperability with intelligent transport systems, it requires integrations at the following three levels: [1] 1. Field to field (roadside ITS station to roadside infrastructure) 2. Field to vehicle (roadside ITS station to vehicle ITS station) 3. Field to command center (roadside ITS station to back office) In this paper, research will be focused on achieving syntax interoperability at the three levels previously mentioned. The solution is based on converting one data format (binary) to another data format (XML, etc.) which understood by systems.

A successful B2B marketplace must ensure that suppliers and producers in a supply chain can find each other, communicate and negotiate in an effective way, while performing business processes. To this, we present an approach that involves two core ontology modules, e.g., the Catalogue Ontology and the Business Process Ontology, which can be extended by adding specific domain ontologies. For the representation of certain business aspects, the Catalogue Ontology exploits the Universal Business Language (UBL), while for the description of product characteristics related to different domains, this ontology makes use of the relevant industrial standards (e.g., the furniture ontology is based on the FunStep ISO 10303-236 standard and the eClass ontology is based on eCl@ss standard). The Business Process Ontology encompasses machine readable vocabularies for the semantic description of business processes and could be extended by adding new ontologies or data schemas. Finally, we validated the design and functionality of the ontology framework by defining and performing a set of queries related to product and services retrieval.