Service-oriented architectures (SOA) are becoming more widespread in the context of Industry 4.0, and their interface descriptions enable modular and scalable communication systems. Since syntactic checks such as data types are solved nowadays, the purpose of this work is to add semantic validation based on the idea of Semantic Web Services. This paper proposes Lightweight Semantic Web Services for Units (LISSU) and integrates promising concepts from the Semantic Web into SOA. We complement existing syntactic checks with semantic ones (e.g. for units), extend one-time initial checks with continuous monitoring, and include expressive constrain-based validations. LISSU can be integrated into any SOA and significantly increases the predictability of communications. Before components communicate, it checks their semantics via ontology URIs and automatically converts units if possible. Continuous monitoring at runtime extracts sent messages and guarantees flawless data quality via constraint-based validations. A real-world demonstrator setup in the manufacturing domain proves effectiveness and practicality. We present LISSU, which integrates concepts from the Semantic Web into SOA setups. It enables a wide range of semantic validations before and during communication, thereby increasing the quality and predictability of SOA communication.

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