Railway modelling - The case for ontologies in the rail industry

As the demand for rail travel grows amongst the travelling public, capacity on the largely Victorian infrastructure is becoming an important issue. High construction costs and the need for environmental responsibility mean that simply building more lines is not necessarily a viable option, and therefore the rail industry is beginning to look for ways in which their current assets can be used more intelligently. In the first wave of this process, a number of new projects have been started that monitor the condition of vehicles and infrastructure, but the greater challenge of integrating that data and using it to support business operations is still largely unaddressed. This paper outlines a number of data handling and data sharing issues that face the rail industry, and presents the argument for the adoption of an ontology-based data standard across the sector.