Initially trained in earth sciences, I worked in railway signalling and automation for nearly 25 years. I was fortunate to explore many corners of the business working for Alcatel, Matra, Siemens and EULYNX, in Germany, France and the Netherlands, from automated metro to ETCS signalling. One day, it caught my eye that, in a business that so depends on high-quality software, high quality data is so hard to come by. That’s where it all started.

Railways are linked – so why aren’t rail data linked?

Signalling systems are complex and look different everywhere. Yet, we can describe such systems in a way that is accessible to people and machines. In this talk I’ll highlight how semantic modelling joins the dots between signalling domain experts and IT experts. And we’ll see how a focus on Linked Data stimulates low-code applications, as opposed to creating data silos that revolve around single-purpose heavy applications.