  Internet of Things (IoT) is transforming the industry by bridging the gap
between Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT). Machines
are being integrated with connected sensors and managed by intelligent
analytics applications, accelerating digital transformation and business
operations. Bringing Machine Learning (ML) to industrial devices is an
advancement aiming to promote the convergence of IT and OT. However, developing
an ML application in industrial IoT (IIoT) presents various challenges,
including hardware heterogeneity, non-standardized representations of ML
models, device and ML model compatibility issues, and slow application
development. Successful deployment in this area requires a deep understanding
of hardware, algorithms, software tools, and applications. Therefore, this
paper presents a framework called Semantic Low-Code Engineering for ML
Applications (SeLoC-ML), built on a low-code platform to support the rapid
development of ML applications in IIoT by leveraging Semantic Web technologies.
SeLoC-ML enables non-experts to easily model, discover, reuse, and matchmake ML
models and devices at scale. The project code can be automatically generated
for deployment on hardware based on the matching results. Developers can
benefit from semantic application templates, called recipes, to fast prototype
end-user applications. The evaluations confirm an engineering effort reduction
by a factor of at least three compared to traditional approaches on an
industrial ML classification case study, showing the efficiency and usefulness
of SeLoC-ML. We share the code and welcome any contributions.
