Open Access

Industrial communication at the field level is highly dependent on the standards and their implementation on industrial PCs and Programmable Logic Controllers. The integration of industrial sensors and actuators requires manual configuration by plant operators and automation engineers. Nowadays interoperability plays an important role in Industry 4.0. For this the OPC UA Foundation and Platform Industrie 4.0 organization have published the Field Device eXchange and Asset Administration Shell standards, respectively, to define interoperable metadata models. However, there is no single way to define a field device metadata model and reuse it with other systems. This leads to heterogeneous data models and a lack of agreement on a generic semantic model for field devices. In this paper, we propose the Industry 4.0 Field Device Ontology to enable an interoperable semantic definition of field devices. The goal of this ontology is to reuse existing information from field devices, such as device description files, device profiles, and their application data. This paper covers the design of the ontology to enable semantic interoperability of field devices, the generalization of application data, and its implementation with the OWL 2 Web Ontology Language. The main contribution of our work is to provide the basic building blocks to enable the development of interoperable field device applications and integration with Industry 4.0 information model standards.