The paper describes a reference architecture for open marketplaces to be used for networked stakeholders in industrial production ecosystems. The motivation for such an endeavor comes from the idea to apply the basic principle of the platform economy to offer functions of an asset “as a service” to industrial production, including the associated supply chain networks. Currently, commercial offers of “production as a service” usually lead to proprietary systems with the risk of platform vendor lock-ins. Hence, there is a need for an open approach that relies upon international (emerging) standards, especially those from IETF, IEC, the Plattform Industrie 4.0 and the International Data Spaces Association (IDSA). The presented approach enables federation of marketplaces according to well-defined interfaces. This article proposes a technology-independent open architecture derived from functional and non-functional system requirements and driven by the idea of the Smart Factory Web, a testbed of the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC). Furthermore, the architecture of the Smart Factory Web (SFW) platform is presented and assessed against the current and future demands of open federated marketplaces for industrial production ecosystems.

Abstract. The provision of accurate, comprehensive and condensed information contained in distributed environmental information systems via public search interfaces raises several technological challenges. Our approach to tackle these challenges is based on a consequent use of ontologies. Starting with an analysis of requirements resulting from semantic search scenarios, we explain the advantages of using ontologies based on standards and aim to reuse and transform terminological systems available in the environmental domain into ontologies. We develop an architecture guided by the premise of exerting a minimum of influence on existing search infrastructures. As a consequence of using a (possibly large) number of ontologies, tools for ontology management are needed. A key argument for using ontologies is that nowadays -as an outcome of the Semantic Web initiative -very powerful processing tools are available. We elaborate ontology mapping as an example and outline how a comprehensive ontology management can be achieved.