An Urban Information Framework to Support Planning, Decision-Making Urban Design

摘要

This paper reports on a 2-year research project undertaken in collaboration with a state planning authority, a major city municipal council and a government-owned development organisation. The project involved the design of an urban information model framework with the aim of supporting more informed urban planning by addressing the intersection where an individual building interfaces with its urban context. This adopted approach enables new techniques that better model the city and its processes in a transparent and accessible manner. The project concentrated on two aspects of this issue. The first concerned the development of a framework for managing information at the precinct and building level through the adoption of an object-oriented database technology that provides a platform for information management. The second involved an exploration of ontology tools and how they can be adopted to facilitate semantic information queries across diverse data sources based on a common urban ontology. This paper reports on the first of those two agendas, examining the context of the work, the challenges addressed by the framework and the structure of our solution. A prototype implementation of the framework is illustrated through an urban precinct currently undergoing renewal and redevelopment, finishing with a discussion of future work that comes out of this project.