Leveraging Semantic Technologies for Digital Interoperability in the European Railway Domain

The European Union Agency for Railways is an authority, tasked with the provision of a legal and technical framework to support harmonized safe cross-border railway operations throughout EU. So far, agency relied on traditional application-centric approaches data exchange among multiple actors interacting within domain. This lead however, isolated digital environments that consequently added barriers interoperability while increasing cost maintenance innovation. In this work, we show how Semantic Web technologies are leveraged create semantic layer integration across base registries maintained by agency. We validate usefulness approach supporting route compatibility checks, highly demanded use case in domain, which was not available over agency’s before. Our contributions include (i) official ontology infrastructure authorized vehicle types, including 28 reference datasets; (ii) reusable Knowledge Graph describing infrastructure; (iii) cost-efficient system architecture enables high-flexibility development; (iv) open source RDF native application checks. work demonstrates data-centric design, powered Linked Data principles, provides achieve unlock new innovative cases applications. Based results obtained during ERA officially decided make Data-based approaches, default setting any future development data, registers specifications under remit mandated EU framework. next steps, already underway, further developing bringing these solutions production-ready state.