Airy Magnien

Airy MAGNIEN, born 29.3.1957, a European citizen, is a physicist and engineer. He has been employed, from 1984, by SNCF (French national railways), SYSTRA (a transport consulting company), and the European Railway Agency (a regulatory Agency). His interests range from rolling stock maintenance, which was his initial assignment, to purchase, then high speed system design and procurement and, from the beginning of the present century, socio-economic impact assessment studies. His toolbox, as a consultant, initially included HP programmable pocket calculators, but soon extended to object-oriented programming (Turbo Pascal / Delphi, Python), model-driven architecture (Delphi Architect, Enterprise Architect) and, recently, ontologies.

He currently is seconded by SNCF to UIC, the international association of railway operating companies. Since 2014, he focuses on railway system modelling, with the publication, by UIC, of RailTopoModel in 2016. Cooperation with other stakeholders made apparent the need for a shared semantic basis for railway terms, leading to the current Ontorail project proposal. And since open, robust, scalable, and user-friendly user interfaces are a must, he also took interest in MediaWiki and its extensions.