Railway infrastructure
Railway Infrastructure Managers across Europe report network data (tracks, operational points, line sections) to the Register of Infrastructure (RINF), used for cross-border route compatibility checks. Document validation is moving from XML Schema (XSD) to SHACL, because SHACL can express constraints that span multiple resources. For example, ensuring every track references an operational point that actually exists in the graph.
XML/XSD was 20 years ago the standard data exchange format. XML can tell you a document is well-formed. It can’t tell you whether a reference inside that document points to something real elsewhere in the dataset. SHACL can, because it validates against the graph as a whole rather than a single document’s tree structure.
The scale is also striking: the European RINF becomes a queryable knowledge graph with over 30 million statements, with a new micro-level topology layer extending the existing macro-level connectivity model.
The world is changing. RDF used to be in the shadow of LPG’s and NoSQL’s. It’s now all over the place thanks to AI (and significant hustling by small companies like Palantir, SAP and Oracle).