Knowledge Graphs as the Semantic Backbone of the Cyber-Physical Pilot Brewery

In the cyber-physical pilot brewery, a knowledge graph is used as the central semantic backbone for structuring and exploiting meta-information. Its foundation is a domain-specific ontology that formally and technology-independently models core concepts of the process industry, including products, recipes, processes, procedures, equipment, and measured variables.

The transformation into an operational knowledge graph is achieved through targeted instantiation of the ontology. In collaboration withDaibe , a data connector approach was implemented that systematically captures operational metadata from existing IT and OT systems and maps them to classes and relations of the ontology. No measurement values or time series are ingested. Instead, only meta-information—such as plant structures, process contexts, references to measured variables, or data sources—is semantically linked and instantiated as a knowledge graph. The resulting graph thus represents the concrete realization of the ontology for a specific production system.