A common core for information modeling in the Industrial Internet of Things

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) faces a fragmentation of interfaces along information modeling formats, communication protocols and service interfaces. This increasingly hinders interoperability and changeability in the IIoT. To overcome this challenge, we propose a technology-independent common core for information modeling in the IIoT. It consists of a minimal type system for literal data values, an addressing and identification scheme based on Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI), the use of both key-value associations and relational references to combine resource-oriented and semantic information modeling, and a set of core relational predicates for object-oriented information modeling. Exemplary mappings of popular IIoT information modeling formats are provided to demonstrate the generality and representational power of the proposed common core.