Ontology-based spatial interlinking of heterogeneous asset data for bridge documentation

Informed decision-making for built assets requires a comprehensive, spatially integrated overview of available documentation. This documentation, however, is typically heterogeneous, siloed, and loosely connected. The spatial relationship of each data source to the structure thereby remains implicit and accessible only to individual experts. To interlink these sources and query them automatically, their spatial relations to the asset must be made machine-readable, yet no vocabulary exists to express them. To address this, the Space Types Ontology (SPOT) is developed to explicitly express these relationships in a format-agnostic way, including the qualitative references that prevail in legacy documentation. The applicability of SPOT is demonstrated by semi-automatically interlinking the documentation of the Nibelungen Bridge in Worms, Germany, into a spatial knowledge graph. This approach makes heterogeneous asset data queryable across data types, reducing dependence on individual expert knowledge and providing a format-independent foundation for informed, data-driven asset management.