Introducing the Public Transport Domain to the Web of Data

The public transport domain generates large amounts of structured data. Making that information available on the Web of Data and linking it to other data sources can enable new services and applications for the benefit of passengers as well as public transport providers. Most standard data models in the public transport domain lack explicit semantics and interoperability because they are modeled in an informal or implementation-centric way. In this paper, we describe the development process of an OWL-ontology based on existing data models and standards in the domain. We show that our ontology enables the development of advanced passenger information systems and we briefly illustrate the application in a tourism-themed prototype. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.