A Semantic Model for Pavement Management Data

Pavement management requires up-to-date data from several sources. For a network of roads, the necessary data include: (1) pavement condition survey data such as pavement distress and surface friction; (2) pavement attribute data such as the number of lanes, length, width, surface type, functional class, and shoulder type; (3) traffic data such as volume, vehicle type, and load; (4) pavement construction and rehabilitation history data; and (5) a digital model of the road network. Currently, these data are mostly kept in heterogeneous databases, which makes the integration of data from sources distributed across the Internet difficult. This paper presents the results of an ongoing research project on a semantic approach to pavement management data modeling. The semantic approach creates a vocabulary to define the pavement management data and ontologies that represent contextual relationships behind the vocabulary. To facilitate automatic data integration from various knowledge domains such as the pavement inventory and the pavement conditions knowledge bases, this study uses a shared ontology that defines the vocabulary common to all pavement management knowledge domains; each knowledge domain must extend the shared ontology for developing its own domain ontology. The scope of this paper will be limited to a discussion of the shared ontology and pavement management domain ontology.