Raising the Role of Vocabulary Hubs for Semantic Data Interoperability in Dataspaces

Dataspaces are an important enabler for industrial sharing data (either commercially licensed or private). Europe is investing heavily into sectoral dataspaces, federation and orchestration platforms like SIMPL, Eclipse DSC, GXFS, etc. Still, dataspaces enable shared data access, but do not solve the data interoperability problem. For that, the consumer would like to see the data from different providers in a harmonized and semantically integrated form. The Vocabulary Hub service (part of the IDS RAM) provides a repository for ontologies and vocabularies. We describe an approach of raising the role of the Vocabulary Hub to also allow richer metadata description (e.g. the meaning of every column in a tabular dataset), and binding semantic descriptions to ingested datasets, thus providing on-the-fly data semantization and easing data querying. This is achieved through the integration of two commercial semantic products (PoolParty and GraphDB), leveraging the partnership between the Semantic Web Company and Ontotext, and is being developed within the frame of the Digital Europe project UNDERPIN, with applications to refinery and wind farm data.