Airy Magnien (M.Sc., Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures) joined the railways in 1984 and was first active in rolling stock maintenance. He provided engineering services for high speed rail projects in Korea and Taiwan. Until 2013, he led the Economic Evaluation Unit of the Agency and then joined the UIC, managing the Rail System Model project. Programming and modelling, initially a mere part of his tool box, have oriented his main activities towards computer science.

Ontologies on the right tracks

Ontologies (formal, shared domain semantics) area proven technology that provides information interoperability, free of implementation-specific details. Success of ontologies is however subject to keeping them highly understandable and manageable. Several attempts to providing ontology-based information that is both rich and compact are presented, in the context of the current Europe's Rail MOTIONAL project and its Conceptual Data Model for railway stakeholders.

UIC is the worldwide professional association representing the railway sector and promoting rail transport.