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arXiv · 1310.5488

A practical approach to ontology-enabled control systems for astronomical instrumentation

Wim Pessemier·Gert Raskin·Hans Van Winckel·Geert Deconinck·Philippe Saey
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Abstract

Even though modern service-oriented and data-oriented architectures promise to deliver loosely coupled control systems, they are inherently brittle as they commonly depend on a priori agreed interfaces and data models. At the same time, the Semantic Web and a whole set of accompanying standards and tools are emerging, advocating ontologies as the basis for knowledge exchange. In this paper we aim to identify a number of key ideas from the myriad of knowledge-based practices that can readily be implemented by control systems today. We demonstrate with a practical example (a three-channel imager for the Mercator Telescope) how ontologies developed in the Web Ontology Language (OWL) can serve as a meta-model for our instrument, covering as many engineering aspects of the project as needed. We show how a concrete system model can be built on top of this meta-model via a set of Domain Specific Languages (DSLs), supporting both formal verification and the generation of software and documentation artifacts. Finally we reason how the available semantics can be exposed at run-time by adding a "semantic layer" that can be browsed, queried, monitored etc. by any OPC UA-enabled client.

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Wim Pessemier, Gert Raskin, Hans Van Winckel, Geert Deconinck, Philippe Saey. 2013-10-21. A practical approach to ontology-enabled control systems for astronomical instrumentation. https://arxiv.org/abs/1310.5488

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