A namespace for reliability work.
kerne.systems is the permanent identifier namespace for Kerne Systems — a brand of Gehrig Partner AG, Basel. It names assets, failure modes, and mechanisms in a form that stays stable across hosting, versioning, and organisational change.
The active resolver for content carrying these identifiers is openrxm.org. Most links you will encounter are served from there.
Currently published
A reference body of rail failure-mode content donated to the Institute of Asset Management’s Rail SIG at RAM 2026 Dublin. CC BY 4.0. Scenario A is live: a VTG Sggmrs(s) 90′ container wagon with the Swiss Federal Office of Transport Fehlerkatalog (BAV-FK-V18-2026, 297 failure modes). Scenarios B (RFC2 linear asset) and C (six-tier provenance vocabulary) are scoped for v1.1.
/corpus/transport/rail/v1/ →Why this, why now
The AO Foundation — surgeryreference.aofoundation.org — solved an analogous problem in orthopedic trauma. The diffuse mass of “complex surgical cases” became a structured, citable, community-maintained reference that every surgeon, every institution, every medical-device vendor could build on. The surgery moved forward together because the substrate was published.
Rail-asset reliability has never had an AO Foundation equivalent. The Open Rail Corpus is the first step toward one. It does not claim to be complete, ratified, or certified — it does claim to be real, traceable, and licensed under CC BY 4.0 for free use and adaptation. A four-layer stewardship framework has been developed openly at openrxm.org since 2019.
What it means for the numbers
The Open Rail Corpus answers what can fail. The Failure Mode Ledger Account — “Failure-Mode Economics”, pat. pend. — answers what is it worth, and what residual remains after we act. FMLA applies Pacioli’s 1494 double-entry principle to physical-asset failure modes: each failure mode becomes a persistent economic account with a liability side (consequence exposure) and a mitigation side (task effectiveness). The balance is what management drives toward zero.
OpEx, continuous. Every franc of maintenance spend becomes traceable to a specific failure mode and to the residual exposure reduction it buys. The blurriness that CFOs and boards accept when asked “what does our maintenance spend actually buy?” becomes answerable. This is the primary contribution.
CapEx, downstream. Aggregated fleet-level FMLA data drives refurbishment, renewal, and replacement decisions — the category sometimes called reliability-centered investment decisions. The corpus is the content substrate; FMLA is the accounting layer; the investment decision is the downstream consequence. Not blurred, not fogged, not ornamental.
Six BAV-coded failure modes on the VTG Sggmrs(s), live computation of annual hours, consequence weight, task effectiveness, residual exposure (FME-x), and maintenance efficiency. Sort by any column. Click a row for the full computation.
/corpus/transport/rail/v1/fmla/ →About the architecture
Kerne Systems separates the identity of a thing from the address where that
thing currently lives. An asset named
kerne.systems/earth/entity/ASSET-… keeps that name even
if the serving infrastructure migrates, is re-sharded, or is federated
across peer resolvers.
This separation is a commitment to long-lived references. Operators, auditors, regulators, and downstream integrators should be able to cite a Kerne-namespaced object today and still find it in ten years.
Contact
Inquiries about the Open Rail Corpus, partnerships, or Kerne Systems more broadly: urs.gehrig@gehrigpartner.ch.