Enabling Data Integration in the Rail Industry Using RDF and OWL: The RaCoOn Ontology

As traditionally infrastructure-centric industries such as the railways deploy ever more complex information systems, data interoperability becomes a challenge that must be overcome in order to facilitate effective decision making and management. In this paper, the authors propose a system based on semantic data modeling techniques to allow integration of information from diverse and heterogeneous sources. The results of work, which aimed to demonstrate how semantic data models can be used in the rail industry, are presented. These include a novel domain ontology for the railways, and a proof-of-concept real time passenger information system based on semantic web technologies. Methods and patterns for creating such ontologies and real world systems are discussed, and ontology-based techniques for integrating data with legacy information systems are shown.