Representing and sharing spatial knowledge using configurational ontology

摘要

The problems related to the management of information increase everyday in several contexts. This process needs of more and more effective and efficient knowledge management techniques. We chose as case study the issue of urban planning and design due to the cultural and scientific innovations, which led in recent years to a completely new interpretation of a city as a system of elements each other connected. In the idea that the urban phenomena are manly driven by the topological structure of the urban space, the science of complex networks is flourishing as a novel reference to include a quantitative modelling approach in territorial planning and design. The paper aim is to give a conceptual framework to integrate the knowledge of the elements composing the city, using an ontology to define, organise and manage them, with the functional potential of the urban space that connects them to each other, stressing the concept of topological structure in terms of configuration. The functional aspects revealed by the configurational analysis of the city-network will be improved and better contextualised by the implementation of an urban ontology-based model. The obtained ontologies are shared using system based on peer-to-peer (P2P) paradigm exposed by a web service.