A Foundation Ontology for City Data

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The pursuit of smarter cities has many drivers, including doing more with less, making better decisions, being more citizen centred and better coordinating the divisions and their activities across the city. One thing shared by these drivers is the need for high quality data generated by a plethora of sources across the city. But due to the complexity of operating a city, they its divisions/services have evolved as silos where each silo has its own terminology and ways of modeling data. But in order to become smarter, cities need better communication and coordination. A critical factor in achieving greater communication and coordination is a shared understanding of the information upon which communication and coordination relies. If the silos do not understand each other, communication and coordination is more difficult. More formally, achieving a shared understanding requires Semantic Interoperability of city data. The goal of this research program is to design a City Ontology to represent the core concepts used to manage cities. A major barrier to interoperability is semantic heterogeneity: different applications, databases, and city departments may ascribe disparate meanings to the same terms or use distinct terms to convey the same meaning. Even when software applications use the same terminology, they often associate different semantics with the terms. This clash over the meaning of the terms prevents the seamless exchange of information across the city. Our objectives are to: 1. Identify candidate concepts and their use cases through a detail analysis of existing city vocabularies, ontologies and city enterprise software. 2. Reduce the candidate concepts from the different sources into a minimal set of core concepts. 3. Manage and curate an open process where Standards Development Organizations (SDOs) and other experts can comment on the core concepts (defined in step 2) and post modifications, use cases and new concepts. 4. Formalize and evaluate the resulting concepts from step 3. 5. Promulgate the results through the Standards Council of Canada and the International Standards Organization so that they will be adopted by cities around the world. In the short term we will focus on city level ontologies, and in the long term we will focus on service level ontologies. The novelty of this research lies in it being the first attempt identify and formalize city level concepts. To date, the development of Ontologies and Vocabularies for cities has either been at too high a level of abstraction (top level or generic), or ad hoc as they are driven by the needs of their particular application. In Canada, more than 80% of the population lives in urban areas. The creation of a city ontology can have a profound affect on the future operations of cities. It will enable the creation of smarter applications by allowing them to use data from across the city into their decision process.