The ERA Ontology (ERA Vocabulary) is the human- and machine-readable semantic model governed by the European Union Agency for Railways. It formalises the concepts of the EU railway infrastructure register (RINF) and authorised vehicles (ERATV).
It represents the concepts and relationships linked to the sectoral legal framework and the use cases under the Agency's remit, as described in the Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2019/777 on the common specifications for the Register of Infrastructure (RINF). Currently, the vocabulary covers the European railway infrastructure and the vehicles authorised to operate over it, and is a semantic, browsable representation of the RINF and ERATV application guides built by domain experts in the relevant working parties.
Since 2021, ERA has published RINF data as an RDF Knowledge Graph, queryable via a SPARQL endpoint and reusable for applications such as route-compatibility checks. The ontology is available in RDF/Turtle/RDF-XML/JSON-LD with SHACL and SKOS artefacts, and is explicitly referenced in the RINF Implementing Regulation.
It is released under the European Union Public Licence (EUPL 1.2).
