Transport and Transportation Ontologies

The objective of the study described in the article was to analyse the features of application of ontologies in the field of transport and transportation. It referred to the exploration of the methods of building ontologies as well as to the information uncertainty hampering building ontologies, based on introduced terms of «transport and transportation ontologies», «ontological management» and «ontological information uncertainty». The main research methods comprised system, ontological, qualitative and comparative analysis. Since the use of ontologies for transport management has been practiced for the last twenty years, the accumulated experience in that field, development of ontologies and the current state of transport infrastructure technology provide grounds for introducing the concepts of «transport and transportation ontology» and «ontological management». The approaches based on those concepts are critically important for further development of transport system, digital transport, efficient management of transport infrastructure objects. A brief analysis of the application of ontologies in the field of transport and transportation refers also to the building of applied ontologies that embrace among others transport and transportation ontology. The study highlights the significance of semantic relationships for building applied ontologies, describes problems of information integration and offers rationale for the use of ontological units of information for building ontologies. It is noted that since a generally shared method of building ontologies is missing, transport and transportation field is now characterised by prevalence of private ontologies, some of them are listed in the article. While highlighting labelling method to build ontologies and describing application of graph databases for modelling semantics, it is shown that building of ontologies is hindered by the diversity of information systems and by a large amount of factual data used in modern transport management that objectively entail information uncertainty, the types there-of as well as methods of their elimination being described.