City Interactions in Urban Planning: The Square Example from an Ontological Analysis Point of View

The evolution of cities and technologies for the city has generated the need and possibility of integrating data coming both from socio-technical and environmental systems, and individual and collective participation in the making of places - of the city in particular. The growth of the possibilities for managing and integrating knowledge has also led to managing, integrating and constantly monitoring the evolution of data and their respective impacts on the territory as in the vision push forward by Urban Digital Twins (UDT). In this paper, we delve into the possibility of managing knowledge and supporting decision making through ontological approaches, and consider the issue of which aspects an ontology should cover for effective disambiguation and interpretation sharing in urban scenarios where different agents and systems must interact. More specifically, we explore the square as a urban type with the goal of reassessing earlier formalization steps in view of the construction of a UDT. The study is a further step along an original research carried out by our group at the crossroads between formalization of complex knowledge and planning of urban complexity.