In the digital era, online platforms redefine business by promoting agility, connectivity, innovation and collaboration. The paper focuses on the work conducted in the DIH4CPS project, which involves developing a semantic model and a web-based tool called the Ei2Network platform for managing organizational networks. This platform prioritizes service management, aiming for expansiveness and reusability. Its primary targets are small to medium-sized companies and Digital Innovation Hubs (DIHs), offering improved visibility and user-friendly management of service and competency portfolios. The platform's contribution lies in enhancing organizational networks, facilitating collaboration, and supporting the efficient management of services and competencies in the digital age.
the term can cover a wide range of different types of platforms, whose functions and characteristics
can differ considerably [
In today's dynamic business environment, companies face many challenges but also many opportunities. However, to achieve success they need to keep pace with emerging trends, technologies, and market shifts. This section presents some key elements of the business context for digital platforms with a special focus on the EU green deal. 2.1.
Digitization with the emergence of digital platforms has fundamentally transformed the meaning
of business. Companies have revolutionized the way they operate, interact with customers, and
conduct transactions. The essence of business in this digital landscape could be characterized by
several key characteristics such as outreach and accessibility, where companies could reach audiences
far beyond their local markets. Another key characteristic of digital business is customer interaction
and engagement in which companies have direct communication to gather feedback on issues and
concerns and customers' preferences [
DIH4CPS project was launched to enhance capabilities of the European Start-ups, SMEs, and MidCaps to create innovative products with advanced digital technologies. This is to be accomplished by setting up a dynamic, comprehensive, and cross-sector one-stop shop for SMEs, DIHs, and technology providers to collaborate. The Ei2Network platform (European Network for Innovation and Interoperability) was launched by the end of the project. The Ei2Network platform is a navigation tool to find the relevant information regarding the services & competencies that can be provided by the network members. The platform allows organizations to showcase their products, services, competencies and skills. Organizations can register and create profiles on the platform, providing details about their business, including their industry, size, location, and areas of expertise. They can also highlight their services, products, competencies, and skills and above all their contact point. Further details are provided in section three.
The Ei2Network platform ecosystem boasts over 70 members, including 34 Digital Innovation Hubs (DIH), and 23 Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), spanning across 14 European countries. The platform serves as a valuable tool for organizations to connect, showcase their offerings, and find potential partners or service providers.
Our contribution to this topic consists of a semantic model in the domain of organizational networks and a web-based tool for its management and user-friendly access. We used semantic web technologies to enhance service management, modeling expansiveness and reusability of the platform. The main goal of the system is to provide more visibility for small and medium-sized organizations and DIHs. Organizations can use it to facilitate user-friendly management and configuration of their service and competence portfolios as well as for a structured search for needed services and collaboration opportunities in the network. These functions can be accessed via a user interface developed as part of the DIH4CPS project, which enables direct and user-friendly interaction with and use of the ontology.
The system consists of several modules, whose interaction is roughly summarized in Figure 2. The Jena Fuseki framework plays a major role, acting as a triple store and providing an API to query and update the RDF data held in the organizational networks ontology using SPARQL. The ontology formally specifies the competencies, services and experiences of organizations and their context. Apache Jena Fuseki was set up on a server and is connected to the Triple Store Access (TSA) module. TSA is a JAVA-based module that uses the Jena API to access the RDF entities (classes, individuals and properties) on the Fuseki server. The TSA module implements the access to the ontology, implements the logical constraints of the ontology on the user interface, and ensures that the ontology remains consistent and specification coherent.
On top of these two modules, the Network Navigation Interface (NNI) as the main module of the stack implements the user interface and logic functions of the tool. It includes the TSA module and uses its exposed interfaces for storing and retrieving data. For the management of login and user account information, the module integrates an SQL database, based on MariaDB. 3.1.
We developed the semantic model in Resource Description Framework (RDF) following the principles from NeOn Methodology [18] and assisted by the Protégé tool. We opted for RDF rather than the more expressive OWL because we wanted to keep the model as lean as possible for performance reasons. Long waiting times for answering a query due to computationally more intensive OWL constraints will have a negative impact on acceptance and therefore on the use of the search interface. The ontology is divided into three modules, so-called domain ontologies: the organization, the capabilities and the custom service ontology. We have reused concepts from the schema.org initiative in the development process wherever possible to allow a semi-automatic tagging of content on the web-based platform and optimize it for search engines.
Organization ontology: The Organization Ontology defines how organizations are defined and managed. We have defined concepts and properties that are necessary to answer the core questions of the requirements - besides descriptive properties about the organization itself (size, organization type, number of employees, etc.), this includes information necessary to filter search results. This includes a catalogue of languages and geographical information on the country and region, based on Eurostat’s NUTS code [19]. The ontology allows to creation of ContactPoints and Persons for an organization, to be able to model sub-organizations (departments) and affiliations that have different areas of expertise and want to be differentiated in the platform. This way, we can connect specific contact options to specific competencies and service offers.
Capabilities ontology: The Capabilities Ontology (see “Catalogs” in Error! Reference source not found., highlighted in red) aims to provide interoperable and accepted catalogues for different types of capabilities. These catalogues enable users to narrow down search queries based on clear categories and are compatible with related platforms to facilitate data exchange between and scaling of similar platforms. The catalogues are hierarchical and provide a multi-layer categorization using subClassOf properties. Short explanatory texts on the classes provide the necessary context for the user. The ontology allows different catalogues to be integrated - in the context of the DIH4CPS project the main focus involved a catalogue for DIH services based on the D-BEST reference model [20] and a catalogue for describing the industrial domains based on the NACE classification [21]. Both catalogues allow a structured characterization of the classes of services and competences. Organizations can directly link to the categories to model their competencies on a basic level.
Custom service ontology: For more detailed capability descriptions, we introduced the Custom Service Ontology. The ontology combines the advantages of interoperable fixed catalogues with the benefits of variable and individual service descriptions. Organization's ContactPoints can create individual services and enrich them with information. Individual service instances must be linked to a service and domain category, but offer the option of adding further individual data. This includes free text information, such as custom names, additional weblinks or service descriptions, as well as more structured information such as service languages, available facilities and related technologies. Using the same modelling principles, the ontology also allows to creation of past experiences. ActivityInstance is a concept that is structured according to similar principles as ServiceInstance but must be in the past and (if useful) allows further information, such as the TRL level achieved or (links to) best practice descriptions. 3.2.
The NNI is the main module of the tool, which is packaged as a Java application and deployed on an Apache Tomcat application server. It consists of several views in a uniform design, which implements the required interface and logic functions for the various users. We describe it based on the characteristics of ontology-enhanced user interfaces from [22] for a first rough characterization of the NNI and then show concrete screen views to illustrate the interaction with the system:
As explained above, the ontology characterizes a part of the real world, namely organizational networks and their capabilities. Users are also part of the ontology but role management is realized by an attached SQL database module.
The ontology contains both class hierarchies/subclass relations, but also other relations (see 2.1).
The Ontology is part of the user interface and is hence used when the system is executed. Ontology Visualization: No presentation, Lists, Graphical, Verbalized, Source Code The interface visualizes different catalogues mainly through lists or tree structures.
The NNI enables users without an ontology engineering background to modify the contents of the ontology. While full modification is restricted for administrators, registered users can create individuals and relations using the functions provided by the NNI. Sticking to the above systemization, we show the implementation of some functions through screen views in NNI, subdivided into view and edit functions.
View: The view functions relate in particular to the search function, which allows you to search the underlying ontology for the right partners to support your own experiments or development tasks. Figure 5 shows the landing page of the NNI, which gives information on the network and is accessible to any user of the portal. The user can use this page to register or log in to his account, or search the network as an unregistered user via the search field. The display of the search result can be seen on the right-hand side of Figure 5. The view visualizes different types of results (classes of the ontology) using symbolic icons. The results can be filtered down using interactive elements (e.g. limiting the search results to organizations or services).
View and edit: Different views are used to enter the organizational information and describe the competencies in the ontology. The TSA module translates the changes in the NNI and transmits them to the ontology to guarantee compatibility with the model. All changes are immediately persisted in the ontology and are reflected in the search results for all users. Users can use these views to edit the organizational data by changing corresponding properties in the organizational ontology. Error! Reference source not found. shows the screens Company Details and Company Portfolio, which are used to edit various organization-specific information.
The master data of the organization can be changed using the Company Details page (left). This concerns simple properties, such as the organization’s name or its PIC number, but also related concepts, such as the creation of contact points.
The company portfolio view (right) allows the user to select which capabilities his organization offers. For this purpose, the catalogues are visualized as a tree diagram and a relation between the organization and the respective category is persisted in the ontology by clicking on it. The catalogues derive from the ontology in the categories and cannot be altered. Similarly, users can also describe customized services according to the ontology using a mix of data fields and service category tree views.
The paper's contribution centers around the work conducted in the DIH4CPS project in developing a semantic model and a web-based tool (Ei2Network platform) tailored for managing organizational networks. The platform emphasizes service management, aiming for expansiveness and reusability. The main targets are small to medium-sized companies and Digital Innovation Hubs (DIHs), offering enhanced visibility and facilitating userfriendly management of service and competency portfolios. In the digital era, online platforms redefine business by promoting agility, connectivity, innovation and collaboration. They are the backbone of modern business, enabling companies to grow their end-user base, reach a wider audience, use data insights, and increase productivity. Digital platforms are driving a fast-digital change in the manufacturing sector. Adopting industry trends improves customer value, innovation, and operational effectiveness. The digital landscape accelerates product lifecycles, changes the dynamics of the market, and increases worldwide competitiveness. In today's dynamic environment, manufacturers need to adopt digital efforts to fulfil changing requirements and enhance development. Ei2Network will continue growing and adding value to its existing knowledge transfer capabilities and ensure the sustainability of the growing network.
The research leading to these results received funding from the European Union H2020 Research and Innovation Programme with Grant Agreements No. 872548 “Fostering DIHs for Embedding Interoperability in Cyber–Physical Systems of European SMEs” (DIH4CPS), No. 825631 “Industrial Data Services for Quality Control in Smart Manufacturing (i4Q)”,
[18] M.C.Suárez-Figueroa, 2010: NeOn Methodology for Building Ontology Networks: Specification,
Scheduling and Reuse. [19] EUROSTAT, 2022: Statistical regions in the European Union and partner countries: NUTS and statistical regions 2021. 2022 edition [20] Sassanelli, C., & Terzi, S., 2022: The D-BEST reference model: a flexible and sustainable support for the digital transformation of small and medium enterprises. Global Journal of Flexible Systems Management, 23(3), 345-370. [21] EUROSTAT, 2008: NACE Rev. 2: Statistical classification of economic activities in the European
Community [22] Paulheim, H. & Probst, F., 2010: Ontology-Enhanced User Interfaces: A Survey. International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems (IJSWIS), 6(2), 36-59. http://doi.org/10.4018/jswis.2010040103