A team of researchers from the Institute on Robotics and Information and Communications Technologies (IRTIC) at the University of Valencia (UV), members of the LISITT group, has published the article “Semantic technologies for cross-border traffic management in the EU context: interoperability, scalability, and compliance” in the high-impact scientific journal Expert Systems with Applications (ISSN 0957-4174), which focuses on expert and intelligent systems applied in industry, public administration and universities worldwide.
The study forms part of the research programme “Semantic Web, ontologies and Linked Open Data (LOD)”, coordinated by doctor José Javier Samper Zapater and doctor José Francisco García Calderaro.
This paper illustrates how semantic technologies can improve interoperability, contextual information integration, explainable reasoning, and dynamic data federation in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Moreover, it highlights that a real-time decision-support dashboard demonstrates the operational applicability of the generated semantic knowledge, providing a foundation for next-generation traffic information platforms and AI-ready mobility services.
The analysis is based on the European CEF LODRoadTran18 project, coordinated by Samper, which sought to improve the interoperability and re-use of dynamic traffic data in Spain and the Czech Republic through the use of Linked Open Data (LOD) and on the doctoral thesis by Dr Julián Gutiérrez Moret, which focuses on open data infrastructure based on semantic technologies for the intelligent management of road traffic incidents and meteorological variables.
Data fragmentation, heterogeneous formats, limited interoperability, and the absence of semantic integration across organizations and countries are included among the key limitations of conventional traffic information systems.
In this sense, the publication presents a traffic information architecture based on semantics, underpinned by the Linked Open Data (LOD) framework, ontologies, semantic reasoning technologies and the GeoSPARQL standard, which, through the semantic web, enables the querying and representation of geospatial data, thereby facilitating traffic information management that is interoperable, federated and AI-ready.
The proposed architecture was deployed within the operational National Access Point (NAP) infrastructure of the Spanish Directorate General of Traffic (DGT). This element combined the ontology-guided semantic transformation of traffic messages from the European reference standard for traffic and traffic information DATEX II, and the cross-domain semantic enrichment with meteorological and geospatial data.
Consideration was also given to Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL)-based contextual reasoning, federated interoperability using the SPARQL graph query standard, and GeoSPARQL-based spatial integration.
The benefits of semantic technologies
The experimental evaluation demonstrated stable local SPARQL execution under workloads of up to 200 concurrent users, successful runtime federation between Spain and the Czech Republic, and the feasibility of dynamically enriching traffic incidents with external LOD geospatial resources through federated GeoSPARQL queries.
The results confirm that semantic technologies can provide a practical foundation for interoperable, scalable, explainable, and AI-ready Intelligent Transportation Systems. These technologies support cross-border traffic-information exchange, advanced semantic integration scenarios, and operational decision-support applications within European mobility ecosystems.
Future research will focus on improving distributed GeoSPARQL query optimisation, integrating Large Language Models (LLM) for natural-language semantic querying, extending semantic interoperability toward multimodal mobility ecosystems, and incorporating real-time predictive AI services based on semantically enriched traffic and environmental knowledge graphs.
The researchers José Javier Samper Zapater, Julián Gutiérrez Moret, Sergio Castillo, Jose Macario de Siqueira Rocha, José Francisco García Calderaro and Ana Delgado Caro have contributed to this study.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2026.133696
