The Interoperability Framework (IF), which is one of the Technology Demonstrators (TD) of the fourth Innovation Program (IP4) dealing with “IT Solutions for Attractive Railway Services”, has first been released by the IT2Rail project (2015-2018). The IF enables technical interoperability of all multimodal services by relieving consumer applications from the task of locating, harmonising and understanding multiple and independent sources of data, events, and service resources, which are consequently made available “as a service”.
The IF realises its definition by:
- providing travel applications with a uniform abstraction of data and services distributed over the world wide web as a “web of transportation data” in the form of linked data and service descriptors annotated with machine-readable logical statements which describe their semantics;
- providing applications with technical means (i.e., packaged resolvers) to operate on such “web of transportation data” – publishing, querying, etc. – where the semantic annotations are used to automate the process of discovering and matching datasets and service descriptors.
IT2Rail has laid the foundations for the achievement of the objectives of TD4.1 - Interoperability Framework - described in the Shift2Rail Joint Undertaking Multi-Annual Action Plan (MAAP). The improvement and enhancement of IT2Rail’s results has been and is under development in the IP4 TD4.1 projects (GoF4R, ST4RT and CONNECTIVE).
The SPRINT project (Semantics for PerfoRmant and scalable INteroperability of multimodal Transport) will make steps towards the uptake of the IP4 multimodal transport ecosystem by addressing the following specific challenges arising from TD4.1’s objectives and explicitly addressed in the work programme topic S2R-OC-IP4-01-2018 Semantic framework for multimodal transport services:
- Improve IF performance and scalability to sustain a large deployment.
- Simplify/automate all the necessary steps needed to integrate new services and sub-systems in the IP4 ecosystem.