Role and goals of ontological analysis in understanding space and places

Planning requires to deal with a large number of information types and heterogeneous relations. This situation is unavoidable because different ´layers´ of knowledge are needed to understand the territory and its processes. In particular, the organization of the territory is strongly based on spatial cognitive frames, representative and perceptual constructs of the agents. These aspects of spatial cognition influence the understanding of the lived space and can be essential for decision making in environmental governance. Furthermore, large degrees of uncertainty are always present at different level and need to be managed by adjusting the planning activities. (Rabino, 2014; Batty, 2009) A territory becomes the subject of planning from its physicality to its status of interconnected place. Place here means an articulated entity with a spatial substrate and many aspects: an interpreted space, a reasoned space, a space enriched with feelings and semantic meanings, and even the result of an aesthetic fruition of a space. Every single agent in a space brings a point of view on it, sees that space as a place or even as many interacting places. Many of these points of view with their social, cognitive, cultural contexts remain unknown at least in part. Ontological analysis is an appropriate approach to structure and even elicit heterogenous knowledge while ontologies, as theoretical artifacts characterizing the intended meaning of a vocabulary in terms of the nature and structure of the entities it refers to (Guarino, 1998), are suitable to manage such knowledge. Our case study is the making process of the strategic plan of Taranto, an Italian industrial city, extended to 2065. We already started community-based, interactive processes aimed at building future scenarios. The ifferent types of elicited knowledge need to be integrated to make a sensible model of the territory and its possible evolution. Via ontological analysis we aim to increase confidence on the resulting model of this complex city. The first goal is to structure the available knowledge to make clear the different types of entities involved and their interactions. This structure can be exploited for a deeper understanding of the different places one can see in the territory making sense of the spatial constraints, the quantitative and qualitative relationships, and the views of agents. Accordingly, the initial step is the organization of knowledge. We discussed and separated knowledge levels and here propose a core system which consists of the spatial, artifactual, cognitive, social, cultural and processual levels. These levels have finer sublevels, e.g., the artifactual level si fomed by the material (where one understands space in terms of materiality), structural (where one understands space in terms of qualified components), proper artifactual (where one understands space in terms of intentionality), functional, and production (where one understands space in terms of manipulation) levels. Accordingly, the initial step is the organization of knowledge. We discussed and separated knowledge levels and here propose a core system which consists of the spatial, artifactual, cognitive, social, cultural and processual levels. These levels have finer sublevels, e.g., the artifactual level si fomed by the material (where one understands space in terms of materiality), structural (where one understands space in terms of qualified components), proper artifactual (where one understands space in terms of intentionality), functional, and production (where one understands space in terms of manipulation) levels. REFERENCES: Batty, M. (2009), Urban Modeling, Elsevier Ltd., LondoM; Nicola Guarino (1998) Formal ontology and information Systems, FOIS 1998, IOS Press, pp. 3-15; Rabino, G. et al.(2014), Ontologie and Methods of Qualitative Research in Urban Planning, TeMA INPUT 2014 Print ISSN 1970-9889, ISSN 1970-9870, pp.863-869.