Urban Ontologies for an improved communication in urban civil engineering projects

Abstract

In this paper, we presented the Towntology project whose objective is to design an ontology in the urban field. This project is divided into several stages. Concerning the prime main objective of the Towntology project, i.e. to build an ontology for urban planning by integrating all urban objects with their descriptions and relations, we began to deal with some fields, such as street planning and mobility. We also developed a software tool which makes it possible for urban planners to work on a semantic network. Thus, we built a visual browser and an ontology editor. An extension of XML is designed and used for the description of the ontology.

Keywords

• urban planning
• interoperability
• information system
• XML
• ontology
• conceptual modeling/modelling