Collective Knowledge Management in City Planning: Building Spatial-Cognition Ontologies from Literary Works

Due to the multiple dimensions of urban complexity, ontology-based multiagent models become widespread. These models seem to support complex relational and cognitive interactions in urban decision-making processes. In this context, simulations and experiments are today investigating ontologies applied to spatial planning, as a support in the real world. Useful feedback can be also found in extensive narratives of some literary works. We explored spatial representations in them, aiming to investigate the complex features and attributes structuring urban spaces, and to develop ontological analyses. A multiagent experimentation was developed with university students, individually selecting extracts from relevant literary works dealing with urban environments, according to the judgment of each student. This paper focuses in particular on the landmark of the urban square (or ‘piazza’), to build an ontology of the square that includes aspects of literary semantics. The reference foundational ontology is DOLCE ontology, represented through Protégé 5.5.0 software.