FYI - New W3C Smart Manufacturing Community Group

A new W3C Smart Manufacturing Community Group has just been launched [1] with the mission to extend schema.org vocabulary through introducing the necessary classes and properties for semantic description of the manufacturing capabilities of Small-to-medium sized manufacturing companies. The group members come from a variety of backgrounds from the government, academia, and industry.

This seems like a good group to watch as it exemplifies the role of lightweight semantics for the Web of Things. I’ve chatted with the proposer Farhad Ameri (Texas State University) who tells me that he has been working on semantics for smart manufacturing for some years in collaboration with NIST.

People are still joining the new CG and once they have appointed a Chair the first step will be to write a joint report setting the areas they plan to address, including the use cases and implementation experience. Farhad tells me that he has worked with OWL and complex ontologies, and is now seeing a emerging need for lightweight approaches. The aim is to able a market of cloud based services, reflecting a transition from costly monolithic software to a more agile use of manufacturing “apps”.

Schema.org [2] was setup by web search engine operators (Google, Bing, Yahoo and Yandex) to provide microdata vocabularies for annotating websites. Developers get instant feed back by checking their search results, e.g. a restaurant showing up on a map along with the open times and contact details.

[1] https://www.w3.org/community/smartmfg/
[2] http://schema.org/

—
   Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org <mailto:dsr@w3.org>>