A new project funded by a €1M grant, after successfully answering to an Open Call of Shift2Rail, was launched in November with the aim of harmonizing the language and data formats used by many railway operators across Europe. ST4RT (Semantic Transformations for Rail Transportation) is the result of an eight-member consortium, coordinated by UNIFE. As one of the main partners of the project, Hit Rail will provide its HEROS platform as a web services interface for some of the work packages and will work alongside its consortium partners including CEFRIEL, D’Appolonia, OLTIS Group, Politecnico di Milano, Trenitalia and UIC.
The Shift2Rail Joint Undertaking is a European rail initiative promoting research and innovation into new rail product solutions. The ST4RT project is expected to contribute significantly to Shift2Rail’s Horizon 2020 initiative and more specifically to the 4th Innovation Programme (IT Solutions for Attractive Railway Services), aimed at developing interoperability technologies for multimodal travel solutions towards the goal of achieving the Single European Railway Area (SERA).
ST4RT will make use of components from the Shift2Rail Interoperability Framework (IF) initially developed in the IT2Rail “lighthouse” project, extending it for use in the related Shift2Rail projects under the “Shopping, booking and ticketing of multimodal travel solutions” and “Travel companion and tracking services ” IP4 calls, called Co-Active and ATTRACkTIVE respectively. ST4RT will additionally provide a use case scenario for exercising the Governance and management structure developed in another project under the related “IF Governance (S2R-OC-IP4-01-2016)” IP4 Open Call called GoF4R. The participants, some of which are also involved in the original consortium of designers for the IF in IT2Rail, will perform work organised in specific work packages focused on fundamental industrial research in semantic web technologies.
A cornerstone of the project will be Work Package 5 “Pilot demonstrator of IF Converters,” where a demonstrator will be used to prove the validity and effectiveness of the semantic analysis conducted in the project. The demonstrator will make use of the HEROS platform provided by Hit Rail, a tool presenting a web services interface capable of exchanging XML booking messages, and of converting them into the formats defined by Technical Document B.5 of TAP TSI.
Antonio Lopez, general manager of Hit Rail, said, “We are delighted that work has now started on the ST4RT project which will contribute significantly to improving rail services across Europe. Hit Rail looks forward to providing full support through our HEROS platform and through the work our team will do alongside our partners in the consortium.”
