An ontology-based data acquisition infrastructure using ontologies to create domain-independent software systems

We created an ontology-based data acquisition infrastructure which is able to store data of almost arbitrary structure and can be set up for a certain domain of application within hours. An ontology editor helps the domain expert to define and maintain the domain specific ontology. Based on the user-defined ontology, a web-based data acquisition system and an ETL data import interface are automatically created at runtime. Furthermore, rules for semantic data plausibility can be established in the ontology to provide semantic data quality for subsequent processing of the collected data. After a comprehensive requirement analysis we decided to use a special meta model instead of standard OWL ontologies. In this paper, we describe our metamodel and the reason for not using OWL in our case in detail as well as we present the infrastructure and the project it is currently used for.