Constructing Railway Ontology using Web Ontology Language and Semantic Web Rule Language

In the traditional railway information system, the users have to create many queries to retrieve specific train information. The results of the queries are based on the syntactic nature of data. A semi-illiterate human being finds difficulty in reading the railway time table. This problem can be effectively handled through semantic technology. Semantic web, future web, will revolutionize the world with machine knowledge processing capabilities. Ontology is the building block of the semantic web. Earlier research on ontology design methodologies shows that manual construction of ontology is a complex process and it is very hard for a designer to develop a consistent ontology. In this paper, we present a methodology based on the usage of protégé 3.4.4 for developing and inferring the railway ontology. This paper describes the features of Protégé 3.4.4, the usage of inference rules framed by using SWRL, query by SQWRL and the inconsistency checking by Pellet reasoner.