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

4 As traditionally infrastructure-centric industries such as the railways deploy ever more 5 complex information systems, data interoperability becomes a challenge that must be over6 come in order to facilitate effective decision making and management. In this paper, the 7 authors propose a system based on semantic data modelling techniques to allow integration 8 of information from diverse and heterogeneous sources. The results of work, which aimed to 9 demonstrate how semantic data models can be used in the rail industry, are presented; these 10 include a novel domain ontology for the railways, and a proof-of-concept real time passenger 11 information system based on semantic web technologies. Methods and patterns for creat12 ing such ontologies and real world systems are discussed, and ontology-based techniques for 13 integrating data with legacy information systems are shown. 14