Supporting data-oriented industrial applications along the cloud continuum

Industrial applications increasingly operate across distributed multi-cloud environments, managing sensor data stored in remote (often poorly connected) mini/micro-data centers allocated on the network edge. The growing complexity of deployment scenarios presents significant challenges in application design, development, and maintenance. This paper introduces the Continuum-Native Digital Object (CNDO) abstraction to support the implementation of data-oriented industrial applications along the cloud continuum. CNDOs extend FAIR Digital Objects (FDOs) and enhance their machine-actionability and data interoperability by adopting robust data management capabilities offered by cloud and cloud-native environments. CNDOs are based on mature Web standards and hide from developers the complexity of data replication and lifecycle policies, thus decoupling the application logic from the system management details, allowing developers to focus on data access and processing.