Soft Mobility Knowledge Model: Heavyweight Ontologies

The paper discusses ontology development approaches that are exploited to create a specific knowledge model for soft mobility. Indeed, sciences related to mobility and transportation can definitely benefit from the use of ontologies to defining machine-interpretable concepts and the relationships between these concepts within their domains. Moreover, the concepts can be formally shared allowing both experts and individuals to reuse domain knowledge and understand the main concepts’ structure. Since 2002, a handful of developing ontological projects concerning soft mobility have been published. However, to be effective in the urban context, soft mobility must be interconnected and isotopic. Therefore, the authors focus on the fundamental elements supporting spatial relationships and establishing connections between regions and economic activities connecting people and the rest of the world. The study builds a heavyweight ontology for some specific elements: soft mobility infrastructure soft mobility networks, soft mobility modes, and soft mobility flows. The development of a heavyweight ontology relies on the use of the Protégé software and the Web Ontology Language (OWL) in order to obtain explicit, simplified, and essential information for planners, engineers, and operators dealing with the soft mobility field at all government and administration’s levels to issue appropriate urban policies.