Ontologica: exploiting ontologies and natural language for railway management: design, implementation and usage examples

This paper presents the "Ontologica" system, a forefront project born from a joint effort between the Department of Informatics, Bioengineering, Robotics and System Engineering of Genoa university and Ansaldo STS (from the same city) in the design of advanced information systems. The aim of the project is twofold: the adoption of ontologies to manage the Centralized Traffic Control (CTC) logics of a railway system; the improvement of the user interface through the exploitation of natural language queries. Being Ansaldo STS a leader in the railway and metro scope, this project aims to develop a system to be tested on a real and large dataset before being adopted in the railway stations using the CTC system. The first results we obtained are very promising and the system is currently under testing and improvement. In this paper we present the "Ontologica" rationale and architecture with some usage examples.