  In the engineering and manufacturing domain, there is currently an atmosphere
of departure to a new era of digitized production. In different regions,
initiatives in these directions are known under different names, such as
industrie du futur in France, industrial internet in the US or Industrie 4.0 in
Germany. While the vision of digitizing production and manufacturing gained
much traction lately, it is still relatively unclear how this vision can
actually be implemented with concrete standards and technologies. Within the
German Industry 4.0 initiative, the concept of an Administrative Shell was
devised to respond to these requirements. The Administrative Shell is planned
to provide a digital representation of all information being available about
and from an object which can be a hardware system or a software platform. In
this paper, we present an approach to developing such a digital representation
based on semantic knowledge representation formalisms such as RDF, RDF Schema
and OWL. We present our concept of a Semantic I4.0 Component which addresses
the communication and comprehension challenges in Industry 4.0 scenarios using
semantic technologies. Our approach is illustrated with a concrete example
showing its benefits in a real-world use case.
