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Rail Topology Ontology: A Rail Infrastructure Base Ontology

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The Semantic Web – ISWC 2021 (ISWC 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 12922))

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Abstract

Engineering projects for railway infrastructure typically involve many subsystems which need consistent views of the planned and built infrastructure and its underlying topology. Consistency is typically ensured by exchanging and verifying data between tools using XML-based data formats and UML-based object-oriented models. A tighter alignment of these data representations via a common topology model could decrease the development effort of railway infrastructure engineering tools. A common semantic model is also a prerequisite for the successful adoption of railway knowledge graphs. Based on the RailTopoModel standard, we developed the Rail Topology Ontology as a model to represent core features of railway infrastructures in a standard-compliant manner. This paper describes the ontology and its development method, and discusses its suitability for integrating data of railway engineering systems and other sources in a knowledge graph.

With the Rail Topology Ontology, software engineers and knowledge scientists have a standard-based ontology for representing railway topologies to integrate disconnected data sources. We use the Rail Topology Ontology for our rail knowledge graph and plan to extend it by rail infrastructure ontologies derived from existing data exchange standards, since many such standards use the same base model as the presented ontology, viz., RailTopoModel.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://uic.org/com/enews/article/norway-railways-essential-to-achieve-climate-goals.

  2. 2.

    https://shift2rail.org/.

  3. 3.

    http://www.capacity4rail.eu/.

  4. 4.

    https://www.eulynx.eu/.

  5. 5.

    https://www.buildingsmart.org/standards/rooms/railway/ifc-rail-project/.

  6. 6.

    https://uic.org/rail-system/railtopomodel.

  7. 7.

    Once standardized, available at https://standards.iso.org/iso/15926/part14.

  8. 8.

    https://networkx.org.

  9. 9.

    https://lov.linkeddata.es/dataset/lov/vocabs/rto.

  10. 10.

    https://www.era.europa.eu/registers_en#rinf.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback. For authoring the ontology and documentation we used Protégé 5.5 [17], Widoco [10] and the OOPS! ontology scanner [18]. To prepare the figures in this paper we used PlantUML and Graphviz.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Siemens AG Österreich, Vienna, Austria

    Stefan Bischof & Gottfried Schenner

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  1. Stefan Bischof
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  2. Gottfried Schenner
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Correspondence to Stefan Bischof .

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  1. University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany

    Andreas Hotho

  2. Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden

    Eva Blomqvist

  3. University of Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany

    Stefan Dietze

  4. IBM Research - Thomas J. Watson Research, Hawthorne, CA, USA

    Achille Fokoue

  5. University of Texas, Austin, TX, USA

    Ying Ding

  6. Imperial College, London, UK

    Payam Barnaghi

  7. Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia

    Armin Haller

  8. Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Povo, Trento, Italy

    Mauro Dragoni

  9. The Open University Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, UK

    Harith Alani

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Bischof, S., Schenner, G. (2021). Rail Topology Ontology: A Rail Infrastructure Base Ontology. In: Hotho, A., et al. The Semantic Web – ISWC 2021. ISWC 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12922. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88361-4_35

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88361-4_35

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