Semantic Data Modelling, Knowledge Graphs
Ontologies and Knowledge Graphs – Corporate IT & R&D
Automotive, Engineering, Digital Innovation
Scania and Traton
Stockholm and Munich
Challenge
Structuring Knowledge
Within Scania’s Corporate IT and R&D organizations, the challenge was to connect large volumes of diverse data across systems, domains, and departments. As digitalization accelerated, the need to link information semantically, ensure data consistency, and enable machine-readable knowledge sharing became critical.
Scania needed a unified approach to represent its product, system, and process knowledge across multiple IT platforms — bridging R&D, operations, and enterprise data while aligning with long-term data governance principles.
Solution
Our Approach: Building Semantic Foundations
Susanne Vejdemo, Ontology Architect at Multiply, played a central role in introducing and expanding the use of ontologies and knowledge graphs within Scania’s Corporate IT and R&D environments.
Working across organizational boundaries, Susanne designed scalable ontology frameworks and demonstrated how semantic technologies could create a shared understanding of data between systems and teams.
Key focus areas included:
· Introducing ontology-driven design, promoting a structured and consistent way to describe and interlink data across systems.
· Integrating ontologies with existing IT landscapes, enabling smoother information exchange and reducing system silos.
· Leveraging knowledge graphs to visualize relationships and dependencies within Scania’s data ecosystems — maximizing reusability and insight generation.
· Embedding data governance principles, ensuring that semantic models align with enterprise data quality, ownership, and lifecycle standards.
· Collaborating across Corporate IT and R&D, translating complex research and engineering data into usable digital knowledge structures.
· Evangelizing best practices, coaching teams and promoting awareness of ontology and semantic data approaches across departments.
Implementation & Execution
Multiply’s structured approach focused on bridging theory and practice — making ontologies and knowledge graphs tangible, usable tools within Scania’s digital ecosystem.
Key achievements included:
· Creating foundational ontology structures supporting product and system knowledge representation.
· Establishing semantic integration principles across data platforms in Corporate IT and R&D.
· Building pilot implementations connecting ontology-based data with existing Scania systems.
· Strengthening cross-department collaboration through workshops, practical demos, and data modeling sessions.
Result
Shared Understanding and Integrations
Key Outcomes:
· Ontology and knowledge graph principles successfully adopted within Corporate IT and R&D.
· Improved semantic consistency and clarity in data integrations.
· Greater cross-functional understanding of complex data relationships.
· Foundation established for scalable, enterprise-wide knowledge modeling.
Impact:
· Accelerated Scania’s digital transformation through smarter data linking and interpretation.
· Reduced duplication and improved data discoverability across systems.
· Enabled a more connected and knowledge-driven IT and R&D environment.
Susanne has been a very valuable resource for our team during the whole year that she was with us. She has been working in an extremely challenging area, and her ability to structure and tackle problems in a systematic and clear way has been invaluable. Susanne has managed to accomplish a few things that have been extremely challenging otherwise.
Joao Dias Ferriera
Head of Knowledge Graphs & IoT, Scania
Future Outlook
Solid Semantic and Knowlege Foundation
With a solid semantic foundation in place, Scania is now positioned to extend ontology and knowledge graph usage across more domains. The initiative lays the groundwork for data-driven decision-making, AI readiness, and cross-domain traceability — ensuring that Scania continues to lead in applying advanced knowledge management to product development and enterprise systems.
Susanne Vejdemo
Ontology Architect