Ontology driven railway RCM data integration

This paper describes the application of a new knowledge representation standard to develop domain ontologies. It describes how Web Ontology Language (OWL) enables the capture of the semantics of railway RCM data structures to represent actual and historic asset RCM status information. This was achieved in the context of European railway integration, and in particular the InteGRail project, where the objective was to support improved decision making through the creation of an application independent railway ontology. This paper describes how this ontology was created with a structured design methodology, using design patterns extended by railway fault concepts and using the extended features of Description Logic (OWL-DL). The creation of a test architecture enabled sample data to be transformed into semantic information. This information was distributed across Europe, enabling the testing of reasoning mechanisms to access the OWL-DL content, finding implicit meaning from the explicit content. Initial tests indicate that the implementation of RCM based OWL ontologies can support more effective information management. This leads to improved maintenance processes and more effective associated operations.