Cefriel's role and experiences in the IT2Rail, GoF4R and ST4RT research projects.

1. Semantic Interoperability in the
Transportation Domain
Cefriel’s role and experiences in the IT2Rail, GoF4R and ST4RT research projects
16 January 2018

2. Interoperability in the transportation domain
2copyright © 2017 Cefriel – All rights reserved
• Interoperability: two systems are interoperable if they are able to
communicate to each other through a complete information exchange
• Solutions: adapters that convert/translate the exchanged information between
different formats.
• Semantic Interoperability: two systems are semantically interoperable if
they are interoperable and if their information exchange is based on the
meaning of the exchanged information
• Solutions: interpreters that transform the exchanged information from each of the
non-interoperable format to a shared model
• The transportation sector is characterized by heterogeneous software
systems that adopt different communication standards for the provision of
their services (e.g., booking, ticketing) resulting highly limited in terms of
interoperability.

3. Shift2Rail
3copyright © 2017 Cefriel – All rights reserved
• Shift2Rail is an European initiative to promote research and
innovation in the areas of rail transport and public transport.
• Objective: accelerate the integration and development of new
technologies and increase the competitiveness of the European railway
industry.
• It is part of the Horizon 2020 research program.
For more info: www.shift2rail.eu
The content of this publication represents the views of the
authors only and is their sole responsibility; it cannot be
considered to reflect the views of the S2R JU or the EC

4. Shift2Rail – Innovation Programme 4
4copyright © 2017 Cefriel – All rights reserved
• Semantic interoperability is one of the IP4
Shift2Rail challenges and consists in the
establishment of a framework which will enable
the business applications belonging to a critical
mass of European travel and transport industry
players to ‘interoperate’.
• The framework will provide the customers with
comprehensive information on the available
transport options, along with the corresponding
processes for their booking, payment,
ticketing, consumption and modification.
Moreover, exclusively for the business
partners (e.g. transport service providers,
distributors, retailers), also their financial
settlement will be provided.
Cefriel is partners of the
IT2Rail, GoF4R and ST4RT projects [1].
For more info: www.shift2rail.org/research-development/ip4

5. IT2Rail – the ‘Information Technologies for Shift2Rail’ project
5copyright © 2017 Cefriel – All rights reserved
• IT2Rail (2015-2018) aimed at providing a new seamless travel
experience, giving access to a complete multimodal travel offer
which connects the first and last mile to long distance journeys.
• One of the results of IT2Rail is the Interoperability Framework
(IF) that provides full interoperability in the transportation
domain whilst limiting impacts on existing systems, without
prerequisites for centralized standardization.
For more info: www.it2rail.eu

6. IT2Rail – the ‘Information Technologies for Shift2Rail’ project
6copyright © 2017 Cefriel – All rights reserved
• Cefriel’s role in IT2Rail:
• Definition of semantic descriptors for the Interoperability Framework assets (e.g.,
ontologies, services and datasets).
• Design and development of the IT2Rail Semantic Assets Manager [2]
• the component devoted to govern the process of maintaining a shared repository of assets;
• built on top of the open-source WSO2 Framework.
• Design and development of the Semantic Discovery Engine of the IT2Rail
Interoperability framework [3]
• the component that enhances the discoverability and the reusability of assets descriptions
by external applications;
• the component provides APIs that perform parametric queries, limiting the risk of exposing
business-sensitive data on the Web.

7. Interoperability Framework Assets
7copyright © 2017 Cefriel – All rights reserved

8. GoF4R – the ‘Governance of the Interoperability Framework for Rail and Intermodal Mobility’ project
8copyright © 2017 Cefriel – All rights reserved
• GoF4R (2016-2018) aims at defining an efficient governance
structure for the Interoperability Framework, promoting its
adoption and sustainability.
• The governance consists in the identification of the roles to be
assigned, and the tasks to be associated with each role, as well as in
the definition of the appropriate rules.
• GoF4R evaluates the maturity of semantic Web technologies for a
large adoption in the transportation domain.
For more info: www.gof4r.eu

9. GoF4R – the ‘Governance of the Interoperability Framework for Rail and Intermodal Mobility’ project
9copyright © 2017 Cefriel – All rights reserved
• Cefriel’s role in GoF4R:
• Back-office analysis of semantic interoperability standards for transportation [4],
aimed to understand to what extent semantic interoperability has taken into account
the transportation market.
• Analysis of semantic interoperability technologies, tools and products available
on the market [4], aimed to understand the maturity of such solutions and the
feasibility of their adoption in the transportation domain.
• Definition of the Interoperability Framework governance structure by the
identification of roles, tasks and rules involved in the management of the
Interoperability Framework assets.

10. ST4RT – the ‘Semantic Transformations for Rail Transportation’ project
10copyright © 2017 Cefriel – All rights reserved
• ST4RT (2016-2018) provides a first case scenario for exercising
the GoF4R governance structure. It deals with the ontology-
based automation of the transformations between existing
European specification exchanges by leveraging the
Interoperability Framework components.
• Two different standards A and B are semantically annotated in order to create mappings from
their data models to the reference ontology.
• Whenever two systems that adopt A and B need to exchange information, the semantic
transformation takes place. A message expressed according to A is “lifted” to its ontological
version, and then it is “lowered” to a message expressed according to B.
For more info: www.st4rt.eu

11. ST4RT – the ‘Semantic Transformations for Rail Transportation’ project
11copyright © 2017 Cefriel – All rights reserved
• Cefriel’s role in ST4RT:
• analysis of state-of-the-art tools for ontology-based annotation and transformation
[5], in order to leverage the latest results from the research and innovation
communities;
• analysis of different approaches to semantic interoperability [5] that can be
distinguished according to two fundamental dimensions: the data schema mapping
(any-to-any vs any-to-one) and the integration logic (centralized vs decentralized);
• design of two alternative any-to-one centralized solutions for the development of the
ST4RT converter [5] that performs the ontology-based automation of the
transformations between existing European TAP-TSI specification exchanges (i.e.,
UIC 918 XML and FSM).

12. References
12copyright © 2017 Cefriel – All rights reserved
[1] Carenini A., Celino I., Comerio M., Pourhashem Kallehbasti M.M., Rossi M., Tanca L.
Interoperability and Governance of IT Solutions for Attractive Railway and Multimodal
Transport Services: the point of view of EU Research. In Proc. of the UITP Global Public Transport
Summit 2017. Available at: http://bit.ly/2n1JRwg
[2] IT2Rail project. D1.2 - Semantic Web Services Registry. Available at: http://bit.ly/2n0ha2Q
[3] IT2Rail project. D1.3 - Semantic Discovery Engine. Available at: http://bit.ly/2DxR4O5
[4] GoF4R project. D4.1 - Initial Semantic Interoperability Technology Market Watch. Available at:
http://bit.ly/2DuGrwt
[5] ST4RT project. D4.1 - Analysis of state-of-the-art ontology conversion tools. Available at:
http://bit.ly/2DYTkf9

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