ScadaOnWeb – Web Based Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition

W3C envisages the future of the web as a “Semantic Web" – an extended web of machine-understandable information and automated services going far beyond current capabilities. The EC funded project ScadaOnWeb contributes to the Semantic Web by defining a new standard giving semantics to structured numeric data. An ontology for SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) applications is made available, enhancing semantics for the engineering domain. This ontology is defined in RDF, RDF schema and OWL. It comprises a basic ontology providing a general model for SCADA data, an ontology for physical quantities, units and data quality, and specific ontologies for different SCADA applications. Large amounts of structured numeric data inherent to most SCADA applications can either be stored within the XML file or within an external binary file referenced from within the XML file. The semantics wrapped around the structured numeric data enables the understanding of the numbers.