The European Union Agency for Railways is a regulatory agency of the European Union (EU) that is responsible for promoting and ensuring the development of a safe, interoperable and efficient railway system across Europe. Its primary focus is on the harmonisation of technical and safety standards within the European rail network. European Union Agency for Railways plays a crucial role in facilitating the integration and cooperation of railway systems among EU Member States. Since, among others, safety and interoperability are part of the key responsibilities of this agency, the Linked Data Event Stream (LDES) specification attracted the attention of European Union Agency for Railways. More specifically, European Union Agency for Railways was interested in addressing the infrastructure change alert use case, as described by Article 6.d of the EU regulation 2019/777, with the LDES specification.
In essence, European Railway Undertakings have train vehicles running on European railway networks across borders and, to ensure safe passage, they need to assess the physical compatibility between the European railway network and their vehicles. Therefore, they need to be alerted if changes in the physical properties of the infrastructure happen in regions of interest. The European Union Agency for Railways was facing a challenge in finding a cost efficient solution to quickly deliver a change alert to its stakeholders (i.e., railway undertakings). With the support from SEMIC, the European Union Agency for Railways conducted a pilot based on the LDES technology which allows this alert functionality.
The European Union Agency for Railways concluded from the pilot using the LDES technology that they would be able to efficiently transfer only the data that has changed, together with its historic records.
LDES thus represents a win-win data publishing approach for the European Union Agency for Railways and its stakeholders. It reduces the costs associated with synchronising an entire base registry at every update cycle. Below the initially proposed pilot architecture and the results of the pilot are shown.
Proposed pilot architecture
This pilot, established in co-creation between the European Union Agency for Railways and SEMIC, entailed the creation of a RINF-based LDES, which leveraged directly the data updates coming from every infrastructure manager, and an initial demo application of the infrastructure Alert service (depicted in blue background in the figure below). Subsequent iterations focused on the integration of the LDES data stream into the existing European Union Agency for Railways Knowledge Graph publishing pipeline. The diagram in Figure 1 shows the architecture used for this pilot.
Fig 1. Pilot architecture.
Objective achieved!
The objective of this pilot was to show how LDES can be useful for the European Union Agency for Railways. Thanks to the LDES technology, railway undertakings can be alerted if changes in the physical properties of the infrastructure happen in regions of interest.
The implementation of Linked Data principles and Linked Data Event Streams in the The European Union Agency for Railways pilot showcased that the adoption of the LDES specification can:
- Reduce the data ingestion time for The European Union Agency for Railways in RINF by focusing solely on the new changes, as opposed to the current way of ingesting data in which the entire XML files are uploaded with each new version.
- Help detect data quality issues in later updates of the data (coming from XML files).
Learn more about LDES in this page, and the details of the solution applied for The European Union Agency for Railways here.
If you have additional questions about LDES or would like to take a similar journey, please contact us.
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