Interlinking life-cycle data spaces to support decision making in highway asset management

• An ontology-based life-cycle data exchange framework is developed for highway projects.
• Two algorithms are developed to help data translation from heterogeneous formats to RDF.
• A software prototype developed can assist life cycle data interconnection.

Technology advances have changed highway project delivery and asset management from relying on 2D paper documents to n-D digital data sets. However, the implementation of diverse software applications imposes big challenges for integrating life-cycle data to support decision making in highway asset management due to the potential inconsistencies of levels of detail, data syntax and semantics. This paper presents an ontology based exchange mechanism that enables unification and interconnection of life-cycle data spaces to support decision making in highway asset management. The mechanism consists of the following key components: (1) domain and merged ontologies, (2) data wrappers and (3) a data query and reasoning system. The mechanism was tested on a sample roadway project retrieved from Landxml.org, and the results indicated the success in integrating fragmented life-cycle data spaces and extracting information for asset management.