Ontologies for an Improved Communication in Urban Development Projects

The main objective of the COST Transport and Urban Development Action C21 is to increase the knowledge and promote the use of ontologies in the domain of urban development, in the view of facilitating the communications between information systems, stakeholders and urban specialists at a European level. Secondary objectives of the Action are: • producing a taxonomy of ontologies in the urban development field, contrasting existing design methodologies, techniques and production standards; • developing an urban development ontology both in textual and visual (graph) presentation and a visual editor to integrate and update concepts, definition, photos into the ontology (software tool); • developing a set of guidelines for the construction of urban development ontologies, based on practical examples (cases); • analysing the role of ontologies in the daily practice of urban development. The research work has been organized along three working groups, the first one dealing more specifically with methodologies for developing urban development