infraspatialOT: An Ontology for the Representation of Spatial Relationships in Road Infrastructure

Road infrastructure is a highly complex system whose functionality is of central importance to society. Due to its complexity, the operation and maintenance of this system can benefit greatly from using a digital representation of the actual system, including its current condition by means of a digital twin. The challenge in designing such a digital twin lies in representing the road infrastructure as an abstract system of systems. Several ontologies already describe the individual subsystems and the aspects relevant to their operation. However, operating a road infrastructure system requires the separate consideration of the subsystems and the relationships between the individual subsystems. This paper deals with the formalisation of these relationships, emphasising spatiality. Following the best practice of the W3C community, the simplicity approach is followed, in which only the spatial relationship of the subsystems to each other is described, and reference is made to domain-specific ontologies (if they exist) for subsystem-specific detailing. The result is an easy-to-use and maintain ontology that fills the gap of considering the road infrastructure system without redefining concepts already defined in other ontologies. Finally, the application of the proposed ontology is verified on a test data set consisting of bridge and road data from Bavaria.