Abstract
Urban environments are urgently required to become smarter to overcome sustainability and resilience challenges whilst remaining economically viable. This involves a vast increase in the penetration of ICT resources, both physical and virtual, with the requirement to factor in built environment, socio-economic and human artefacts. This paper, therefore, proposes a methodology for eliciting, testing, and deploying, requirements in the field of urban cybernetics. This extends best practice requirements engineering principles to meet the demands of this growing niche. The paper follows a case study approach of applying the methodology in the smart water domain, where it achieves positive results. The approach not only heavily utilises iteration alongside domain experts, but also mandates the integration of technical domain experts to ensure software requirements are met. A key novelty of the approach is prioritising a balance between (a) knowledge engineers’ tenacity for logical accuracy, (b) software engineers’ need for speed, simplicity, and integration with other components, and (c) the domain experts’ needs to invoke ownership and hence nurture adoption of the resulting ontology.
Highlights
To tackle global sustainability and economic challenges through information and communication technology (ICT), urban environments, such as water networks, are undergoing a transformation towards ‘smart domains, such as smart water, through the use of web-enabled sensors, analytics software, and decision support tools
A recent report from the ICT4Water cluster of European Commission 7th Framework (EC FP7) projects highlighted the need for standardised models to address the issue of interoperability in the smart water domain [5] and indicated the importance of ontologies as a means to maintain semantic clarity and integrate knowledge
Modern ontologies typically use the W3C semantic web stack, and so are written in a subset of the web ontology language (OWL). This mandates that the statements are formed as resource description framework (RDF) triples, which is to say that they must follow the format of subject–predicate–object, such as ‘Dog’ ‘isATypeOf’ ‘Animal’
Summary
To tackle global sustainability and economic challenges through information and communication technology (ICT), urban environments, such as water networks, are undergoing a transformation towards ‘smart domains, such as smart water, through the use of web-enabled sensors, analytics software, and decision support tools. A recent report from the ICT4Water cluster of European Commission 7th Framework (EC FP7) projects highlighted the need for standardised models to address the issue of interoperability in the smart water domain [5] and indicated the importance of ontologies as a means to maintain semantic clarity and integrate knowledge. All of this leads to a clear emerging challenge in the smart water domain of developing common communication protocols, data models and semantic vocabularies. By formalising all parts of these statements in a detailed manner, they become machine interpretable and enable easier integration across semantic web resources, as well as inference and rule applicability
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