Towards Data-Centric Geospatial Applications: A Knowledge Graph Approach to Road Maintenance in Stockholm, Sweden

Sammanfattning

Background Digital twins offer great potential for transforming urban management to be more effective and sustainable. By adopting a data-centric approach, cities can become more innovative, moving away from application-centric solutions with data silos toward an interoperable modern data architecture. This thesis designs and develops a data-centric knowledge graph-based tool for road maintenance together with the Stockholm Traffic Administration Office. Methodology and System Architecture The research established a workflow to develop a standardized data-centric model to manage the road space. By analyzing the current operational and asset register systems at the Stockholm Traffic Administration Office, architecture was developed for a tool that accessed similar data content. The tool was constructed integrating geospatial road data into a CityGML-3CIM data model as a knowledge-graph, which was linked with the Swedish National Road Database (NVDB). This semantic approach facilitates data description and interoperability, through established standards. The data model was specifically classified to align with existing road maintenance requirements and the open-source software QGIS was utilized for the tool’s spatial visualization and management. Results The results demonstrate how a data-centric approach turns data into a central resource in the organization, a "Single Source of Truth" eliminating data silos and facilitating internal and external interoperability. Any update to the knowledge graph is reflected instantly across the organization, maintaining high data quality and removing the need for manual resource-heavy data conversion typical of application-centric solutions. The research offers several recommendations for how the organization can adopt a data-centric approach to road maintenance and concludes that further work on the topic is recommended and essential for the digital transformation of urban management.