AE SemRL: Learning Semantic Association Rules with Autoencoders

Association Rule Mining (ARM) is the task of learning associations among data features in the form of logical rules. Mining association rules from high-dimensional numerical data, for example, time series data from a large number of sensors in a smart environment, is a computationally intensive task. In this study, we propose an Autoencoder-based approach to learn and extract association rules from time series data (AE SemRL). Moreover, we argue that in the presence of semantic information related to time series data sources, semantics can facilitate learning generalizable and explainable association rules. Despite enriching time series data with additional semantic features, AE SemRL makes learning association rules from high-dimensional data feasible. Our experiments show that semantic association rules can be extracted from a latent representation created by an Autoencoder and this method has in the order of hundreds of times faster execution time than state-of-the-art ARM approaches in many scenarios. We believe that this study advances a new way of extracting associations from representations and has the potential to inspire more research in this field.

Semantic Association Rule Learning from Time Series Data and Knowledge Graphs

Digital Twins (DT) are a promising concept in cyber-physical systems research due to their advanced features including monitoring and automated reasoning. Semantic technologies such as Knowledge Graphs (KG) are recently being utilized in DTs especially for information modelling. Building on this move, this paper proposes a pipeline for semantic association rule learning in DTs using KGs and time series data. In addition to this initial pipeline, we also propose new semantic association rule criterion. The approach is evaluated on an industrial water network scenario. Initial evaluation shows that the proposed approach is able to learn a high number of association rules with semantic information which are more generalizable. The paper aims to set a foundation for further work on using semantic association rule learning especially in the context of industrial applications.

Ontologies in Digital Twins: A Systematic Literature Review

Digital Twins (DT) facilitate monitoring and reasoning processes in cyber-physical systems. They have progressively gained popularity over the past years because of intense research activity and industrial advancements. Cognitive Twins is a novel concept, recently coined to refer to the involvement of Semantic Web technology in DTs. Recent studies address the relevance of ontologies and knowledge graphs in the context of DTs, in terms of knowledge representation, interoperability and automatic reasoning. However, there is no comprehensive analysis of how semantic technologies, and specifically ontologies, are utilized within DTs. This Systematic Literature Review (SLR) is based on the analysis of 82 research articles, that either propose or benefit from ontologies with respect to DT. The paper uses different analysis perspectives, including a structural analysis based on a reference DT architecture, and an application-specific analysis to specifically address the different domains, such as Manufacturing and Infrastructure. The review also identifies open issues and possible research directions on the usage of ontologies and knowledge graphs in DTs.