Exploiting Smart City Ontology and Citizens' Profiles for Urban Data Exploration

摘要

Smart Cities are complex systems, collecting together huge amounts of heterogeneous data mainly concerning energy consumption, garbage collection, level of pollution, citizens' safety and security. In the recent years, several approaches have been defined to enable Public Administration (PA), utility and energy providers, as well as citizens, to share and use information in order to take decisions about their daily life in Smart Cities. Research challenges concern the study of advanced techniques and tools to enable effective urban data exploration. In this paper, we describe a framework that combines ontology-based techniques and citizens' profiles in order to enable personalised exploration of urban data. Ontologies may provide a powerful tool for semantics-enabled exploration of data, by exploiting the knowledge structure in terms of concepts organised through hierarchies and semantic relationships. Smart City indicators are used to aggregate data that can have different relevance for target users, the activities they are performing and their role (e.g., PA, utility and energy providers, citizens) within the Smart City. Ontologies combined with users' profiles enable effective and personalised recommendation and exploration of urban data.