Ontologica: exploiting ontologies and natural language for representing and querying railway management logics

This paper presents the 'Ontologica' system, a forefront project born from a joint effort between university and industry in the design of advanced information systems. The aim of the project is twofold: to adopt ontologies and new technologies to manage the Centralized Traffic Control logic in a railway and all the rules making the physical elements of a rail station acting as desired; to improve the user interface with a mechanism to interact with the system using natural language queries. The first results we obtained are very promising. In this paper we discuss them, with the 'Ontologica' rationale and architecture.