A socio-cultural ontology for urban development
Stefan Trausan-Matu
Computer Science Department
313, Splaiul Independentei
Bucharest, Romania
Romanian Academy Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence
13, Calea 13 Septembrie
Bucharest, Romania
socio-cultural ontology starting from Engeström’s Activity Theory and the
on the usage of ontologies in knowledge-based processing. A skeleton of an
ontology containing the basic concepts related to the socio-cultural aspects in
urban development is introduced. Implementation alternatives are discussed.
Keywords: Ontology, Activity Theory, Urban Development, Knowledge
Acquisition, Knowledge-Based Systems
1 Introduction
The growth of towns, combined with the fast cultural changes due to globalization
and the population migrations, emphasize the importance of considering socio-
cultural aspects of urban development. One desired goal in the near future is the
building of the Knowledge-Based Society, in which the already omnipresent
computer programs will rather process knowledge that only information. Knowledge
processing supposes frameworks that gather the basic concepts or, using a more
technical word, the ontology of the considered domain, in order to provide more
personalized, more intelligent services. The same ideas determine the evolution of the
Web towards a Semantic Web [2], which extends the facilities for knowledge-based
processing, collaboration and information retrieval. Ontologies and knowledge
processing are also major ingredients of this new generation of the Web.
A socio-cultural ontology for urban development is an essential component if we
assist urban development specialists to consider socio-cultural aspects in their
projects. For example, such an ontology may be used in the semantic search and
want to have flexible, extensible, intelligent, knowledge-based programs that can
http://www.racai.ro/~trausan
trausan@racai.ro
“Politehnica” University of Bucharest
triadic categorization scheme of C.S. Peirce. It also discusses some general ideas
www.springerlink.com © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007
S. Trausan-Matu: A Socio-cultural ontology for urban development, Studies in Computational
Intelligence (SCI) 61, 121–13 0 (2007)
trausan@cs.pub.ro
Abstract. The paper presents an outline of a methodology for developing a

combination of web services in urban related applications. It also may be very helpful
for the development of natural language processing programs that provide help,
answer questions and give advice about, for example, the issues to be considered for
further analysis.
The importance of having good ontologies became clear in the knowledge
acquisition activities needed in symbolic artificial intelligence programs. However,
their success was probably definitively assured in the actual context of information
overload due to the expansion of the Web, and in the route to the Semantic Web.
Building an ontology is not a simple activity. It implies philosophical thinking and
it is helped if some theoretical outline is provided for the domain for which they are
applications (see, for example, http://wordnet.princeton.edu), was developed starting
from psycholinguistic experiments. In the case of urban development, where huge
communities of people share buildings, roads, parks, etc., such a theoretical skeleton
may be provided by the Activity Theory of Yrjö Engeström [3].
The paper continues with an introduction in ontologies. The third section, after it
introduces the Theory of Activity, discusses which could be the basic components of
a socio-cultural ontology and how could new concepts be derived.
2 Ontologies
In recent years, the term “ontology” is widely used in computer knowledge-based
specification of a conceptualization... That is, an ontology is a description (like a
formal specification of a program) of the concepts and relationships that can exist for
this definition is the fact that it considers several perspectives, going from the
computational view to the social particularities of communities.
Ontologies in computer science are represented in computer readable languages
(e.g. OWL, see http://www.w3.org/2004/OWL/) as collections of concepts, relations
and restrictions. However, their genealogy may be considered from different
perspectives: philosophical, computational, and psychological.
Each philosophic system starts with a theory about reality, a theory about what is
considered that exists, a so-called ontology. In the process of building an ontology in
a computer application, the designer must identify the fundamental categories, the
relations and the differences among them. This is exactly one of the main activities
that many philosophers, like Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Peirce also have done. Therefore,
philosophy has an important role in ontology engineering. For example, John Sowa,
in a knowledge engineering book [6], wrote an entire chapter about the basic ontology
he developed, that integrates ideas from the above famous philosophers and from
others like Heraclit, Hegel, Leibniz, Whitehead, Husserl and Heidegger. Table 1
shows the basic categories he identified. There is, in fact, nothing surprising. It is
122 Stefan Trausan-Matu
and others). WordNet, a very successful ontology for natural language processing
the categories introduced by important philosophers (e.g. Aristotle, Kant, Peirce,
built. For example, John Sowa proposed a top-level ontology [6] starting from
systems. Probably the most well known definition is the following: “An ontology is a
an agent or a community of agents” [4]. Probabl y one of the reasons of the success of