Berlin Public Transport Ontology (BPTO)

A domain ontology (OWL 2 DL) for modelling historical urban public transport infrastructure from periodic sources such as timetable books, statistical yearbooks and annual reports, developed for the study of Berlin's divided transport networks between 1946 and 1989. The ontology separates persistent identity from time-indexed state through a Core/Snapshot pattern grounded in DOLCE, and organises its 45 classes and 119 properties in three domains (Transport Infrastructure, Administrative Geography and Institutional), each with its own temporal rhythm, while supporting cross-domain queries. This deposit contains: bpto_v100.ttl, the ontology, with a changelog in its header BPTO Competency Questions.md, the 55 competency questions bpto_exemplar.zip, a demonstration dataset for four snapshot years (1960, 1964, 1967 and 1984) of about 20,000 triples in seven Turtle files, with provenance recording how the values were produced and from which sources, together with 52 SPARQL queries, the competency-question outcome table (40 questions assessed), the scripts of the reasoner check and the transcriptions behind the data model_comparison.zip, the same schedule matrix encoded as BPTO snapshots, 4D-fluents and named-graph versions, for two line-years Companion paper: Kim-Baumann, N. J., 'Preserving Nested Temporalities in Historical Transport Infrastructure Modelling', Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (under revision, DSH-2026-0176).