Public Transport Ontology For Passenger Information Retrieval

Passenger information aims at improving the user-friendliness of public transport systems while influencing passengerroute choices to satisfy transit user’s travel requirements. the integration of transit information from multiple agenciesis a major challenge in implementation of multi-modal passenger information systems. the problem of informationsharing is further compounded by the multi-lingual and multi-cultural population of developing countries such asindia. ontology, by explicit specification of conceptualisation, not only addresses the issues pertaining to syntacticinteroperability arising due to widely varied system architectures and software used by different agencies, but alsoensures semantic interoperability caused by cognitive and naming heterogeneity. this paper develops a domainspecificontology for public transport systems, which is further integrated with the domain-ontology of urban featureswith an objective of supporting multi-modal public transport information retrieval. the ontology thus developed isformalised using web ontology language. in order to evaluate the capability of ontology in passenger informationretrieval, the proposed ontology is implemented for five regular bus service routes and one bus rapid transit routein ahmedabad city. the study defines 1336 named individuals ( instances of concepts in ontology) including 293instances of urban features and 1043 instances of public transport features. the capability of ontology in supportinggeneral service information queries, itinerary planning, and multimodal trip planning have also been demonstrated.the study concludes that the domain-specific public transport ontology when integrated with urban features ontology,not only enables sharing of data across multiple transit agencies, but also expands the search space for passenger routechoices by sharing the meaning of information.