A semantic approach to railway data integration and decision support

The work presented in this thesis was motivated by the desire of the railway industry to capitalise on new technology developments promising seamless integration of distributed data. This includes systems that generate, consume and transmit data for asset decision support. The primary aim of the research was to investigate the limitations of previous syntactic data integration exercises, creating a foundation for semantic system development. The objective was to create a modelling process enabling domain experts to provide the information concepts and semantic relationships between those concepts. The resulting model caters for the heterogeneity between systems supplying data that previous syntactic approaches failed to achieve and integrate data from multiple systems such that the context of data is not lost when centralised in a repository. The essence of this work is founded on two characteristics of distributed data management; the first is that current Web tools, like XML, are not effective for all aspects of technical interoperability because they do not capture the context of the data; and second, there is little relationship between conventional database management systems and the data structures that are utilised in Web based data exchange which means that a different set of architecture components are required.