Efficient web access to Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture semantics

Ten years ago, industry and academia have set an ambitious vision to bring down the lot numbers of mass production to size one. This would enable highly configurable and individualized products. The vision has eventually become known as the fourth industrial revolution. For a long time, mass production of highly customized products was associated with high costs and resource inefficiency. A solution for these issues would open up entirely new possibilities. So far, setting up the production lines for mass production has been a very expensive and time-consuming task. As a result, only bigger companies could afford to bring up new products to the market through mass production. In contrast, small companies and highly innovative startups can get easily pushed out of the market by competitors who are able to leverage mass production to produce a similar product cheaper. To realize the vision of the fourth industrial revolution, four design principles have been identified: interconnection, information transparency, decentralized decisions, and technical assistance. Within this thesis, the technology stack from the World Wide Web is investigated as a possible technology building block for the interconnection and information transparency challenge of future Industry 4.0 applications. To ease the migration path of the industry domain this thesis combines the web technology stack with the most promising Industry 4.0 technology of the industry domain, which is OPC UA. For the integration of OPC UA into the World Wide Web ecosystem, three main challenges have to be solved: (1) Providing access to OPC UA data through web standards; (2) Transformation of OPC UA semantics to Semantic Web standards; (3) Provide an efficient interface to access the data.