Abstract

The paper will provide a taxonomy of freely available European open data types and sources that are potentially related to support asset management activities which aim at improving the global safety of railway networks. The taxonomy was developed exploring available data sources within several European countries and generalizing different major categories of data that is available. Specifically, the taxonomy organizes the available open data sources into the domains of transport, energy, disaster, industry, natural resources, environment, administrative, climate, and demography. Each of these categories contain different branches of sub-categories ending in leave nodes representing specific types of data sets available openly within European jurisdictions. The taxonomy forms the first step in developing a linked open data information management system for the GoSafe Shift2Rail project. In combination with the closed information available at network managers this information management system can then be used as input for probabilistic risk assessment and the risk based ranking of assets that will be provided by GoSafe's Network Decision Support Tool.