Chaired by: Marco Comerio (Cefriel), Mersedeh Sadeghi (Politecnico di Milano), David Chaves (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid), Pieter Colpaert (University of Ghent)
Website: http://sem4tra.linkeddata.es/
Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) consists in the integration of various forms of transport services into a single mobility service. The goal is to provide a traveler with the service needed for a door-to-door travel under a single payment whilst integrating disparate modes of mobility (public transport, car- or bike-sharing, taxi/car rental, or a combination thereof) under one travel experience.
After years of conceptualization and strategizing, MaaS is becoming a present reality rather than a future goal. However, many challenges remain unanswered. The development of multimodal travel information, planning and booking services, and the interoperability between business applications is currently limited due to the fragmentation and incompatibility of interchange formats and protocols both within and across transport sectors.
The technology known as RDF, Linked Data and the Semantic Web, proposes a framework to discuss the semantics of terms in a decentralized fashion on web-scale. As MaaS is decentralized by definition, this workshop targets researchers and practitioners that are contributing to transform the transportation sector by proposing new semantic-based solutions to achieve the MaaS objectives. The workshop is an opportunity for disseminating and discussing use cases and studies showing the application of semantic technologies in the Transport domain to tackle the above-mentioned challenges.
Marco Comerio (Cefriel, ITALY - www.linkedin.com/in/marcocomerio): He is a researcher and project manager at Cefriel. He is involved in the development and realization of studies and applied research projects in the field of digital innovation. Most of his current research activities focuses on the design and development of semantic interoperability solutions and governance frameworks for the railways and public transportation sectors. He is currently applying his research skills in the projects SPRINT (Semantics for PerfoRmant and scalable INteroperability of multimodal Transport, H2020-S2R 826172), Shift2MaaS (Shift2Rail IP4 enabling Mobility as a Service and seamless passenger experience, H2020-S2R 826252), and SNAP (Seamless exchange of multi-modal transport data for transition to National Access Points, EIT Digital 19281). He has published more than 60 referred papers in books, conference proceedings, and journals and
Mersedeh Sadeghi (Politecnico di Milano, ITALY- https://www.linkedin.com/in/mersedeh-sadeghi): She is a post-doctoral researcher at Politecnico di Milano. Currently, as a participant in the SPRINT (Semantics for PerfoRmant and scalable INteroperability of multimodal Transport, H2020-S2R 826172) project, her research activity is particularly focused on study and development of software architecture, patterns and tools as the enabler for tackling the syntactical and semantical heterogeneity in the distributed systems composed of technically, geographically and administratively discrete sub-systems such as transportation and mobility systems. Before that, having the software engineering of distributed systems as the main theme of her research, her activities were mainly concentrated on the Internet/Web of Things domain. In specific, she investigated the semantic and model-based approaches for the conception, development, and operation of services that create the backbone of today’s smart spaces.
David Chaves-Fraga (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, SPAIN - https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-chaves-fraga/): David Chaves-Fraga is a PhD student at Ontology Engineering Group, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. His research is focused on virtual knowledge graphs generation from heterogeneous data sources exposed on the Web using mapping languages. He is applying all his research in the transport domain and he has participated in several EU research projects such as SPRINT, GoF4R, SNAP or OASIS. He is one of the organizers of the Knowledge Graph Building Workshop (KBG) at the Extended Semantic Web Conference 2019. He is part of the PCs for ISWC2019 (D&P track) and ICTERI2019 and he has also participated in the PCs of conferences ICTERI2018 and ICTERI2018-PP and as an additional reviewer in ISWC18. He is also the main coordinator of the formative international program Open Summer of Code in Spain.
Pieter Colpaert (Ghent University, BELGIUM – https://pietercolpaert.be/#me): Pieter Colpaert is a post-doctoral researcher at the Internet and Data Lab (IDLab) – Ghent University – imec, taking up the role of Technology Coordinator of Smart Flanders. He holds a PhD in engineering technology from Ghent University since 2017. Back in 2012, he co-founded a not for profit organisation to promote Open Knowledge in Belgium and the iRail working group at this organization. The latter still is the most popular developer interface for public transport data in Belgium. Today, he leads the Linked Open Data Interfaces team at IDLab, researching how Open Data can affect our lives for the better.
