Can ontologies make transport data integration faster, smarter and easier to reuse?

Transport networks generate huge amounts of data, but much of it remains locked in disconnected systems, formats and schemas. For digital twin practitioners, data owners and infrastructure teams, this creates a familiar challenge: how do you bring different datasets together in a way that is meaningful, scalable and resilient to change?

Join this week’s Gemini Call with Liam McGee, Chief Scientist at Kaiasm, and Jack Davies, Senior Developer at Kaiasm, for a fast-paced practical demonstration of ontology-backed multimodal data integration in action.

Rather than a slide-based presentation, this session will focus on a live demonstration using bridge strikes as the worked use case — an incident type that affects both road and rail. Liam and Jack will show how six heterogeneous, natively disconnected datasets, including Network Rail bridge strike and route data, NaPTAN station data, CORPUS reference codes and the National Highways strategic road network, can be mapped to a shared ontology using RML triples maps, visualised in OntoKai, processed through a triplification engine and loaded into a graph database.

They will then demonstrate how this approach can answer genuinely cross-modal questions using single SPARQL queries, without bespoke join logic. For example: which passenger stations and major road junctions are affected by a strike at a named bridge, and how far away are they? Attendees will see the results as a table, a queryable graph and a geospatial map overlay, alongside an incident-breakdown query showing how ontological inference can surface useful answers that were not explicitly asked for.

Why attend?

Digital twins depend on trusted, connected and reusable data. Yet many organisations still spend significant time repeatedly solving the same integration problems whenever two datasets need to work together.

This session will show how placing an ontology at the centre of an integration landscape can reduce a many-to-many mapping problem into a one-to-many approach. Each new dataset gains connections to the wider data landscape more easily, helping improve discoverability, preserve provenance and make queries more resilient as schemas evolve.

What you’ll learn

• How ontology-backed integration can connect multimodal transport datasets without bespoke join logic
• How open standards including RDF, RML, SPARQL and GeoSPARQL can support a practical integration pipeline
• How a bridge strike use case can bring together road, rail, station, route, incident and geospatial data
• How graph-based approaches can return answers as tables, queryable networks and map overlays
• Why semantic integration should be treated as a knowledge problem, not just a technical data-processing task
• How well-documented data dictionaries and ontology definitions can make datasets more useful for future users

What you’ll take away

In just 30 minutes, you will get a practical view of how ontology-backed integration works in a real transport context. You will leave with a clear understanding of the pipeline, from disconnected source data to shared ontology, graph database, SPARQL query and geospatial output.

The session will also touch on how quickly new datasets can be onboarded when the right documentation and semantic foundations are in place, and how this approach could support non-specialist querying, LLM-assisted search and future agentic AI applications by grounding answers in explainable, well-structured data.

Who should attend?

This session is ideal for digital twin practitioners, transport data owners, infrastructure professionals, data scientists, systems architects, policy teams and anyone working on interoperability across transport, the built environment or connected places.

About the speaker

Liam McGee is Chief Scientist at Kaiasm, where he works on taxonomy and ontology-led approaches to data integration across complex infrastructure and industrial environments.

Jack Davies is a Senior Developer at Kaiasm, bringing hands-on expertise in building practical tools and workflows that transform disconnected data into queryable, graph-based structures.

Register now for free to see how ontology-backed integration can turn fragmented transport data into connected, actionable insight.

Part of the weekly Gemini Call series, hosted by Digital Twin Hub and Connected Places Catapult.

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