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Welcome to the CDM-MOTIONAL wiki!

What is the CDM?

CDM means "Conceptual Data Model", a coined expression rooted in ancient railway research history, hence not completely describing the thing itself. See 01-What-is-the-CDM? for more details.

Semantic web advocacy

The CDM, as developed under MOTIONAL, fully embraces Semantic Web technologies

Why do we need yet another IT technology for the purpose of seamless data exchange across railway-related actors and applications? After all, RDBMS for storage and XML for data exchange do most of the job every day, and pretty well.

The problem is, in complex distributed systems, or rather "systems of systems", such technologies lose efficiency. This gave rise to semantic web technologies from the late XXth century, technologies that are now widely adopted in biology or pharma industry, and start to spread over infrastructure or network managers.

Of course, there are the seminal publications by Tim Berners-Lee. The reader can however find a short, down-to-earth apologia (not: apology!) under 02-Semantic-Technologies-vs.-Document-Models-(XSD,-JSON-schema...).