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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Global Understanding Environment

subject

description

Industry pushes a new type of Internet characterized as the Internet of Things, which represents a fusion of the physical and digital worlds. The technology of the Internet of Things opens new horizons for industrial automation, that is, automated monitoring, control, maintenance planning, and so forth, of industrial resources and processes. Internet of Things definitely needs explicit semantics, even more than the traditional Web—for automatic discovery and interoperability among heterogeneous devices and also to facilitate the behavioral coordination of the components of complex physical-digital systems. In this chapter, the authors describe their work towards the Global Understanding Environment (GUN), a general middleware framework aimed at providing means for building complex industrial systems consisting of components of different nature, based on the semantic and the agent technologies. The authors present the general idea and some emergent issues of GUN and describe the current state of the GUN realization in the UBIWARE platform. As a specific concrete case, they use the domain of distributed power network maintenance. In collaboration with the ABB Company, we have developed a simple prototype and vision of potential add-value this domain could receive from introducing semantic and agent technologies, and GUN framework in particular.