Industrial systems face the challenges of robust and flexible control of industrial processes while satisfying the demand of mass customization and reduced time to market. To meet these requirements, systems need to work in a distributed manner, because the traditional centralized approaches are not sufficient. To achieve automated cooperation and coordination of distributed components at a larger scale, semantic technologies are necessary to enable truly open systems. The authors review state of the art of the research of ontologies, Semantic Web and Semantic Web services, together with advances of usage of semantic technologies in industry. The usage of semantic technologies is illustrated on two applications – semantics in multi-agent manufacturing systems and structural search in industrial data.
