Introduction

Bosch Semantic Stack forms the basis for comprehensive digitization of production and logistics by gradually creating consistent data homogeneity and interoperability.

The Bosch-specific AAS V3.0 implementation is based on the Asset Administration Shell (AAS v3.0) - Registry Service Specification Profile SSP-001 API and Asset Administration Shell (AAS v3.0) - Discovery Service Specification Profile SSP-001 API specifications.
Thus, Bosch Semantic Stack is "Catena-X ready". See also Catena-X and Asset Administration Shell.

Any asset — it can be an actual physical asset like a drilling machine but also something virtual like a web service — has a digital representation with consistent semantics, called a digital twin. Digital twins represent those assets and services and provide a shell for their aspects which define the functionality which the digital twin supports. Aspects provide the actual data of the digital twin that clients can use. Think of an aspect as a live thing, i.e., a service that can be queried to retrieve current or aggregated data. The data can be anything from a single numeric value — e.g., a temperature measured by a sensor — to a complex block of data.

Each aspect references a concrete Aspect Model. This model describes in a formal, i.e., machine-readable, format how an aspect is structured. The Aspect Model describes, for example, the used physical unit and possible value range of the temperature sensor. Note that even in this simple example, a conventional approach could not satisfyingly answer the question of where this kind of information would otherwise live — in the sensor’s data sheet that is only a human-readable document? In the aspect’s API documentation that is also only human-readable? Should the information about the sensor’s physical range be hard-coded in the aspect and included in each service reply, even though it never changes? By expressing it in the Aspect Model, the aspect’s semantics can be made available to consumers of the data in a way that opens up new possibilities.

To specify an Aspect Model, Bosch Semantic Stack relies on the Semantic Aspect Meta Model (SAMM), an open standard by the Eclipse Semantic Modeling Framework (ESMF).

Read more about the single parts that constitute Bosch Semantic Stack: