The concept of Interoperability Framework (IF) is at the core of the Shift2Rail Innovation Programme (IP) 4, and it is the key concept for facilitating a seamless travel experience for users across borders and modes. The IF enables the technical interoperability of heterogeneous, multimodal transport-related services by relieving applications from the task of locating, harmonizing and understanding multiple and independent data and event sources, services, etc. A series of past and ongoing projects related to Shift2Rail IP4 (IT2Rail, ST4RT, GOF4R, CONNECTIVE) have developed and are refining and extending a set of core concepts and technologies that are part of the IF. The Semantics for PerfoRmant and scalable INteroperability of multimodal Transport (SPRINT) project will improve key aspects of the Shift2Rail IF to bring the market uptake of the multimodal transport ecosystem envisioned by IP4 closer to reality. In particular, the project will address the following specific challenges posed by the objectives of TD4.1 objectives and explicitly addressed by the S2R-OC-IP4-01-2018 call:

• Improve IF performance and scalability to sustain a large deployment.
• Simplify/automate all the necessary steps needed to integrate new services and sub-systems in the IP4 ecosystem.

To this end, the project will:

• Define a reference architecture for the Shift2Rail IF, which will take into account recent advances in the design and development of distributed systems, and in particular of cloud-based ones.
• Define techniques facilitating – in particular by increasing their level of automation –activities that are central to the concept of IF, such as the collaborative creation and management of ontologies and of semantic-based mappings between heterogeneous data representations.
• Demonstrate the proposed improvements to the IF through a proof-of-concept implementation that will reach at least TRL 4.