Improving industrial collaboration with linked data and OWL

Abstract

We present a product-centric collaboration platform comprising partner companies and their customers. By employing the Linked Data principles it enables them to easily publish and retrieve information about products and to include user-generated content as well as publicly available information from the Linked Open Data web. Information about products is modelled as OWL ontologies, which makes it more useful and easier to understand for application developers. Self-explanatory data structures also lower the threshold for new partners interested in joining the network and contributing their products. The versatility of this approach is illustrated by two application scenarios.