A computer-aided urban planning tool driven by semantic web ontologies

We present 4 City Semantics, a software tool for city planning driven by semantic web ontologies. With this tool the participants of the urban development process may identify an urban intervention site and respective surrounding area and semantically annotate them with knowledge about the use of the land and the type and size of its population, following a customizable workflow. The key principle behind the tool lies in the use of semantic web ontologies for the representation of land use systems, planning process workflow and population data, offering the user as much flexibility as possible, so that s/he can reuse or develop any semantic web ontology describing the standards that s/he wants to use in order to formulate an adequate intervention program. Such flexibility is achieved through modular ontologies that provide a clear separation of urban knowledge from the application tool, which was specially designed to cope with different urban semantic standards.