Tangible capital asset ontology in infrastructure management

Infrastructure organisations own, operate and manage infrastructure systems to provide uninterrupted services to various communities. To manage infrastructure systems (composed of a set of interrelated and interconnected tangible capital assets (TCAs)), infrastructure organisations use a range of computer and paper-based information systems. Municipal infrastructure organisations find it difficult to exchange the TCA data with other agencies as part of the reporting requirements due to some issues: heterogeneity of data format, lack of formal descriptions of various classes of data and lack of component-wise aggregation of data. To address these issues, an ontology of TCAs was developed using an eleven-step approach. The tangible capital asset ontology (TCA_Onto) represents knowledge in the facility and four infrastructure sectors: transportation, water, wastewater and solid waste management, which was used to formalise message templates for the asset inventory and condition assessment reporting/TCA reporting. The formalised message templates were implemented in a prototype asset information integrator system developed as part of this research work. The TCA_Onto was verified and validated as part of the evaluation using a criteria-based approach.