Abstract
Abstract. Because of the need for new sustainable future alternatives, the re-inhabitation of rural areas, hinterlands, small historical urban centres and villages has become a unique real opportunity. Therefore, it is necessary to define and adopt new sustainable urban planning and building permits to follow this path. These processes involve both various actors and disciplines and a variety of spatial and semantic data. For this reason, the present research aims at providing a methodology to build the necessary spatial documentation of historical centres and villages by adopting an ontology-based workflow. Existing ontologies and conceptualisations have been considered together with classes and rules from city historical core regulations. A case study has been selected considering its available spatial datasets and national data models. The bottom-up approach here adopted aims at validating and enriching a reference ontology previously developed in the domain of historical centre by adding new concepts and relations from selected regulation plans and other existing ontologies and data models. Finally, the obtained ontology is also populated with instances of concepts and relations.
Highlights
Due to the need for sustainability and environment - friendly choices, as well as decentralisation - even more recently outlined by the pandemic and the climate change effects on cities (Istituto di Architettura Montana, 2020; Mercalli, 2020) - the restoration, revitalisation and the re-inhabitation of marginal urban or rural areas and small historical centres and villages are regarded as a new real opportunity and a necessity
This study presents an ontology-based workflow to semantically define small historical centres and develop a knowledge base to describe village’ case studies according to their regulations and zoning plans
This study could support further activities aimed to develop sustainable future options, such as the re-inhabitation of rural areas and hinterlands. The results of this methodology, an ontology populated with some information from a real case study, describes a first attempt made to define instances of a village to document it and support urban plans concretely
Summary
Due to the need for sustainability and environment - friendly choices, as well as decentralisation - even more recently outlined by the pandemic and the climate change effects on cities (Istituto di Architettura Montana, 2020; Mercalli, 2020) - the restoration, revitalisation and the re-inhabitation of marginal urban or rural areas and small historical centres and villages are regarded as a new real opportunity and a necessity. Urban planning and transformation regulated by building permit processes are incredibly relevant These processes require diverse information as a reference and could be effectively supported by the digitalisation and efficient information representation, including semantic, spatial and temporal aspects. Some research attempts to semantically define through ontology historical centres and city’ core (Colucci et al, 2021; Fiorani, 2019; Kokla et al, 2019) Despite these efforts, none of these studies can fully spatial describe the knowledge related to historical centres and villages’ semantics. The ontology-based enrichment and population approach is based on data models of national maps combined with further semantic information derived from official documents that describe; further essential aspects regarding the historical value and character of the village, such as the external appearance of existing buildings and the urban spatial structure.
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