Semantic data integration and monitoring in the railway domain

Information integration is a key for further growth of efficiency in management decisions for the railway domain. In the context of the EU project InteGRail (funded in the 6th framework programme) an integration approach leveraged by ontologies known from the semantic web and logic-based reasoning mechanisms has been successfully demonstrated. To this effect existing heterogeneous monitoring data acquired across the European railways (in the context of rolling stock, infrastructure, operations and traffic management) is logically integrated according to a formal information model. Based on distributed reasoning mechanism decentralised data and inferred knowledge does not have to be aggregated in a central repository but can be transparently accessed by applications independently from where it is acquired. We explain how the proposed techniques facilitate integration, analysis and interpretation of distributed observation data in the railway domain. In addition, the implementation of the presented approach is presented by a demonstration scenario, which integrates existing real-world data for symptom identification and incipient fault detection.