icbnet

Production data are usually distributed across various heterogeneous data sources such as legacy systems, event producers, sensors, planning and scheduling tools, etc.. Thus, in order to pave the road towards sensing enterprise, there is a need for a robust communication layer, which allows seamless data exchange and integration. As discussed in this paper, the proposed solution involves the use of ontologies, well-defined models that describe the important concepts, relationships, and constraints of the domain of production management. A middleware, which objective is to achieve data integration that comes from all possible sources via exploiting ontological models, is presented. Due to the sensitivity of the aforementioned data presented in legacy systems in terms of varsity and security, the adoption of a reliable solution for controlling data access and secure communications is essential,. The definition and enforcement of access control policies take into account attributes of the modelled entities, events, and contextual parameters, such as temporal or spatial. It is based on the expressive stack of Web ontology languages that are used for the formal representation of rules, inference and decision making over access operations.