Semantic Computing for Railway Infrastructure Verification

We present an approach for modeling, verification and debugging of railway infrastructures. The aim of this work is to improve the planning process of new railway lines. We define a set of OWL ontologies for describing the static interrelations of railway tracks and safety elements. Planning instructions-so far available in natural language only-are formally modeled by SWRL rules. The Open World Assumption underlying OWL makes it difficult to perform ontology debugging. Therefore, the concept of Semantic Constraints-based on a dynamic rule composition process-is developed.