Smart City Design Based on an Ontological Knowledge System

Abstract

Smart city has several definitions. Typically, it is an alliance of subsystems that have following objectives: improvement of quality of life of citizens, better use of limited resources and best use of existing infrastructure. Transportation as one of the most important subsystems shall be thus understood as one player working together with energy management, economy, eGovernment, and others. Synergy is the key to successful implementation. In order to be able to aim at the joint objective function and any synergy, the different subsystems must “understand” each other. Ontology has been acknowledged to be the most common tool to do that. To prepare an ontology for a domain (for example transportation) is a complicated task. In order to do that in a city, where there are several subsystems with complex behaviour is even more challenging. It is very difficult if not impossible to get experts from different fields to prepare a common ontology. In this paper we address the issue of Smart City Design and propose a pragmatic method to prepare an ontological knowledge system using the knowledge of various expert groups. A new concept, so call a knowledge matrix, is defined and used to enable cooperation of experts from different fields. We believe this can further help in implementation of any smart city projects. In order to demonstrate the approach, transportation domain is used as an example for the ontology design. The approach will be further validated within two case studies that are also introduced within this paper: Smart Evropská street in Prague and within a project Smart City – Smart Region – Smart Community, where a transport behavioristic model is being developed based on the ontology described within this paper.