An ontology of the Appropriate Assessment of …Corrado Zoppi & Sabrina Lai Università di Cagliari...

Corrado Zoppi & Sabrina LaiUniversità di Cagliari - Dipartimento di Ingegneria Civile, Ambientale e ArchitetturaVia Marengo, 2 – 09123 Cagliari, ItalyTel.: +39 070 6755216/6755206, telefax: +39 070 [email protected]; [email protected]

Eighth International Conference onInformatics and Urban and Regional Planning

Naples, June 4-6, 2014

Smart City: planning for energy, transportation and sustainability of the urban system

An ontology of implementation plans of historic centers.

A case study concerning Sardinia, Italy.

C. Zoppi & S.Lai “An ontology of implementation plan of historic centers. A case study concerning Sardinia, Italy.”

LAYOUT

1. Introduction: scope and aim

2. The context

3. Ontology and formal ontologies

4. Implementation plans of historic centers (IPHCs)

5. An ontology of IPHCs

6. Conclusions


1. INTRODUCTION - SCOPE AND AIM

• regional and urban planning processes in Sardinia

Fram

ew

ork

• Regional Landscape Plan (RLP), established by the Decision of the Sardinian Regional Government (DSRG) no. 36/7 of 5 September 2006

Co

nte

xt

• Planning tools that implement the Planning implementation code (PIC) of the RLP within the “Areas characterized by historic settlements”

• For these areas, the PIC defines a set of prescriptive rules and planning criteria (articles nn. 51-53).

IP

HC

s


1. INTRODUCTION - SCOPE AND AIM

Within the framework of the provisions of the RLP, and after providing the reader with a thorough presentation of some important technical issues related to IPHCs and a discussion on the semantics of the term “ontology”, this paper discusses some key points concerning the ontology of the IPHCs procedure, that is the spatial analysis of the IPHCs and implied planning measures (third section).

This discussion regards the IPHCs’ definition procedure in the context of the municipal planning processes stated by the provisions of the PIC of the RLP, with the objective of proposing the ontology as an important contribution to the definition and implementation of this procedure.

Result: some important general observations concerning the utility and effectiveness of the ontological conceptual framework that help planners and decision makers understand and structure the assessment process of plans.

We develop the ontology on the basis of these normative standpoints, and implement its construction through Protégé (Stanford University)


2. THE CONTEXT - SARDINIA AND ITS RLP

Some facts about Sardinia

2nd largest island in the Mediterranean Sea (~24,000 km2).

Fewer than 1.7 million inhabitants (2011 National Census).

Low population density (~68 residents per km2).

Vast majority of people living close to the sea.

Inner areas hilly and sparsely populated.

A more robust legislative power than most Italian regions.

The Sardinian RLP initially focused on the coastal zone because of the complexity of development conflicts arising from tourism and other development.

It is therefore not surprising that the Sardinian RLP was the first statutory landscape plan with regional dimensions

produced in Italy under the 2004 legislation (“National Code of Cultural Heritage and Landscape”), requiring that landscape plans should be in force in each region.


2. THE CONTEXT - RLP & IPHCs

Article no. 52 of the PIC of the RLP identifies the IPHC as a plan which has to be approved through the cooperation of the Sardinian regional administration and a municipality as a necessary precondition for a municipality to exert its ruling power over the local transformation processes related to the municipal spatial jurisdiction, which implies a considerable pressure on the local administrators in order to implement valuable and effective planning processes concerning the municipal historic centers.

Following the RLP’s approval, the Sardinian regional administration provided municipalities and practitioners with guidelines and documentation which are significantly influencing the implementation of the planning processes of IPHCs.

As a consequence, in the planning processes of the IPHCs, heavily influenced by the control of the technical staff of the regional offices, a strong

consistency and implied uniformity do show up as:1. a strong attention to historical, typological and morphological

characteristics in terms of the territorial analysis of historic urban settlement systems, which are identified by the RLP as “Centers of

antique and primary development”;2. a strong prescriptive ruling framework characterized by a markedly-

conservative attitude.


• Widely-accepted meaning: “Discussion of the substance of an object”.

Ontology

• “Discussion of the substance of the relations between agents and structures” (capital, social classes, agreed-upon semantics, etc.) which do not possess their own essence, formed only through their being in relation.

• This should be the reference point for planning practice (DeLanda, 2006; Hillier, 2010).

Relational ontology

• It is the ontology of the system of relations, i.e. an ontology of the reality (Hillier, 2010), and scholars ought to be aware of and to describe this reality, by identifying and analyzing its relational substance.

Realistic ontology

• “Discussion on the substance of an agreed-upon representation”.

• Therefore, a discussion on the identification of a concept or domain, i.e., the cognitive contents identified by a set of agents as characteristics of the domain.

• They are not connected to substance or to essence, but to the essence of representations, or definitions.

• They are descriptions of domains of objects as closed data models whose nodes define concepts, which are strategically identified and make sense only in the context of the universe they try to model (Smith, 2003).

• Their use originates in the “Tower of Babel” syndrome experienced in several disciplines and due to proliferation of available data sets, abundance of complex data systems, differences in semantics.

Formal ontologies

3. THE SEMANTICS OF THE TERM “ONTOLOGY”


3. DEFINING “FORMAL ONTOLOGIES”

“An explicit specification of a

conceptualization” (Gruber, 1993)

“A formal, explicit specification of a shared

conceptualisation”(Studer et al., 1998)

“The manifestation of a shared understanding of a

domain that is agreed between a number of agents”

(Agarwal, 2005)

“A particular knowledge base, describing facts assumed to be always true by a community of users, in virtue of the

agreed-upon meaning of the vocabulary used.”

(Guarino, 1998)

“A shared and common understanding of a domain that can be communicated

between people and application systems”

(Davies et al., 2003)

“A knowledge acquisition task, which involves eliciting,

analysing and intepreting human knowledge, and transferring this

knowledge into a suitable machine representation”

(Mizen et al., 2005)

“A formal description of a domain that is

understandable to people and readable between machines”

(Hart et al., 2007)

Formal ontologies are connected to the essence of

representations, or definitions.


4. THE IPHCs – Lack of strategic visions

IPHCs of Sardinian municipalities reflect

properly and precisely the planning

guidelines of the regional administration

Lack of an explicit strategic vision which should characterize

the planning processes

Instead, planning processes are mostly concerned with the

analysis of the historic urban settlement

system and of building typologies

Projects mainly consist of limited and conservative interventions

There is no evidence of theoretical and practical connections between IPHCs and any strategic vision concerning the future(s) local (urban) economic and social development even though several strategic plans (established shortly before the IPHCs) put in evidence a potential strong link between planning processes related to historic centers and local economic and social development.

The analysis of the strategic approaches to the definition and implementation of plans for the historic centers provide the municipalities with sets of objectivesthat could be very useful

to assess the strategic effectiveness of their IPHCs

to identify suitable planning paths to improve the quality of life and to catalyze economic and social local development.

These sets may eventually make more comprehensive and multifaceted the almost-monotonically conservative and philological character of the actual IPHCs.


4. THE IPHCs – Tentative strategic objectives

We propose a tentative general set of objectives to define and implement IPHCs (two general objectives further subdivided into specific objectives):

1. improving the quality of municipal life in the short run

1.1. promoting the urban system of the historic center and its relationships with the rest of the

municipal area

1.2. improving the quality of the historic center’s built environment through urban maintenance and

renewal

1.3. increasing the quality and potential of the historic center’s public spaces in terms of aesthetic

attractiveness, urban fabric and functionality

1.4. organizing and increasing the quality of commercial and retail sale activities

1.5. promoting the image of the historic center through marketing campaigns related to the local, regional, national and international tourist markets

2. promoting local development in the medium and long run

2.1. making housing in the historic center more interesting and attractive

2.2. implementing cooperative(public and private) actions to generate a system of competitive urban services, capable of responding to social demand

2.3. improving accessibility, mobility efficiency and the situation of thru-traffic flows in the historic

center, by encouraging public transport, walking and cycling, and discouraging private transport

2.4 implementing participatory practices to support planning processes


4. THE IPHCs – Spatial analysis & planning measures

The starting point to describe the PIC-based technical approach to the definition and implementation of an ontology of the spatial analysis and implied planning measures of IPHCs is represented by art. 52 of the RLP, titled “Areas characterized by historic settlements. Prescriptive rules.”

Article 52 of the RLP is articulated into four parts.

First, it deals with the question of spatial analysis, to be carried out through:

a description of comprehensive urban characteristics of the municipal area, such as orography, water resources and hydrography, natural resources, settlement system(s), municipal walls and ramparts and urban landmarks;

an analytic description of the historic centers’ built environment and open spaces, which is implemented through detailed and accurate records related to each public and private block, buildings and built structures, private yards and public spaces (squares, parks, gardens, widening-road areas, etc.), with particular reference to the built environment’s degradation and obsolescence state.



Second, a classification of the allowed interventions is proposed, which makes reference to the category definitions of art. 3.1 of Italian Law 2001/380.

The allowed interventions are limited to ordinary and extraordinary maintenance and conservative restoration and refurbishment. In this way, the RLP states that …

the spatial analysis should result in prescriptive statements constituting the normative core of IPHCs

these statements should comply with a general conservative approach to be implemented through very restrictive rules related to allowed operations on the built and non-built environment.

Third, the most invasive and transformative interventions (i.e. radical restructuring of the existing buildings and change of parts of the urban historic morphology such as block shapes, streets, squares) are limited to the parts of the historic centers where the spatial analysis puts in evidence that the original characteristics of buildings and urban morphology are dramatically and irreversibly altered.

Even in the case of radical interventions, art. 52 states that restructuring projectshave to focus on the general objective of defining transformations which willeventually generate conditions consistent with the not-irreversibly altered or wellpreserved parts of the historic urban settlements and morphology. For the normative category definitions of these interventions see points “d”, “e” and “f” of art. 3.1 of Italian Law 2001/380.



Fourth, the IPHCs should rule over the functional uses of the buildings within the historic centers:

general normative point of reference: the residential uses should be the most preferred

as a consequence, houses should maintain their residential use status and the number of the existing residential units should possibly increase as a consequence of the IPCHs’ operations

moreover, municipalities are encouraged to strengthen the availability of public services for residents so that historic centers may become more attractive for people and families who are deciding about the location of their houses

alternatives to residential uses are identified as accommodation activities for tourists, such as hotels, residences and multi-building hotels, private and public service activities, medical services, craftmanship workshops and retail shops.

Finally, the rules of IPHCs should careful consider the opportunity of maintainingunbuilt the areas resulting from the demolition of ruins.

To sum up, the provisions of article 52 of the PIC of the RLP state that the IPHCsshould be based on spatial analysis, whose interpretation of the urban settlementsand morphology of historic centers is the point of reference for the conservative and transformative operations established by IPHCs.


5. AN ONTOLOGY OF IPHCs

Analysis to be carried out within an IPHC comprises an analytic description of the historic centers’ built environment and open spaces, to be implemented through detailed and accurate records concerning each spatial unit and detailing both conditions and provisions for each element in that unit.

An ontological approach can effectively support this task.

The ontology of the domain “Implementation plans of historic centers was developed according to the phases suggested by guidance documents produced by the Ordnance Survey (Hart et al., 2007, Hart and Goodwin, 2007, Kovacs et al., 2006).

•What is the ontology going to be used for?

•What is going to be included in the ontology? What needs to be left out?

1. Identification of purpose &

scope

•Identification of core concepts

•Identification of secondary concepts

•Identification of relationships

2. Knowledge elicitation

• Formal specification of the domain

•Concepts organizedin classes

3. Knowledge structuring

•Software-guidedfilling in of forms

•Consistency check

•Constraints

4. Validation



Our ontology …

Must represent and describe the built environment of a given historic center in order to support the making of IPHCs.

Aims at providing plan makers with a robust descriptive framework on which they can ground the selection of allowed building activities.

•What is the ontology going to be used for?

•What is going to be included in the ontology? What needs to be left out?

1. Identification of purpose &

scope

An ontology must not be comprehensive. It should not include all those entities that somehow relate to the domain, but only those concepts, relationships, constraints that are relevant.As an ontology domain, it must be reusable within the given domain.



A glossary (“knowledge glossary”), comprising two tables, is developed:

Table of concepts (core and secondary, definitions, sources).

Table of relations.





Table of concepts: an excerpt.

CORE CONCEPT DEFINITION SOURCE

Manutenzione ordinaria

"interventi edilizi che riguardano le opere di riparazione, rinnovamento e sostituzione delle finiture degli edifici e quelle necessarie ad integrare o mantenere in efficienza gli impianti tecnologici esistenti

DPR 2001/380, art 3.1.a

Manutenzione straordinaria

opere e modifiche necessarie per rinnovare e sostituire parti anche strutturali degli edifici, nonché per realizzare ed integrare i servizi igienico-sanitari e tecnologici, sempre che non alterino i volumi e le superfici delle singole unità immobiliari e non comportino modifiche delle destinazioni di uso DPR

DPR 2001/380, art 3.1.b

Restauro/risan. conservativo

interventi edilizi rivolti a conservare l'organismo edilizio e ad assicurarne la funzionalità mediante un insieme sistematico di opere che, nel rispetto degli elementi tipologici, formali e strutturali dell'organismo stesso, ne consentano destinazioni d'uso con essi compatibili. Tali interventi comprendono il consolidamento, il ripristino e il rinnovo degli elementi costitutivi dell'edificio, l'inserimento degli elementi accessori e degli impianti richiesti dalle esigenze dell'uso, l'eliminazione degli elementi estranei all'organismo edilizio

DPR 2001/380, art 3.1.c

Ristrutturazione edilizia

"interventi di ristrutturazione edilizia", gli interventi rivolti a trasformare gli organismi edilizi mediante un insieme sistematico di opere che possono portare ad un organismo edilizio in tutto o in parte diverso dal precedente. Tali interventi comprendono il ripristino o la sostituzione di alcuni elementi costitutivi dell'edificio, l’eliminazione, la modifica e l'inserimento di nuovi elementi ed impianti. Nell’ambito degli interventi di ristrutturazione edilizia sono ricompresi anche quelli consistenti nella demolizione e ricostruzione con la stessa volumetria di quello preesistente, fatte salve le sole innovazioni necessarie per l'adeguamento alla normativa antisismica nonché quelli volti al ripristino di edifici, o parti di essi, eventualmente crollati o demoliti, attraverso la loro ricostruzione, purché sia possibile accertarne la preesistente consistenza. Rimane fermo che, con riferimento agli immobili sottoposti a vincoli ai sensi del decreto legislativo 22 gennaio 2004, n. 42 e successive modificazioni, gli interventi di demolizione e ricostruzione e gli interventi di ripristino di edifici crollati o demoliti costituiscono interventi di ristrutturazione edilizia soltanto ove sia rispettata la medesima sagoma dell'edificio preesistente

DPR 2001/380, art 3.1.d

Nuova costruzione interventi di trasformazione edilizia e urbanistica del territorio non rientranti nelle categorie definite alle lettere precedenti

DPR 2001/380, art 3.1.e



Relation Definition of the relation in natural language Notes

Is a A an instance of B

Is part of A is a part of B“Is part of” is inverse of “Has

part”

Has part A has B as part“Has part” is inverse of “Is part

of”

ContainsA completely contains B (where A is a human created legal entity or

similar such as a county)

“Contains” is inverse of

“Contained by”

Contained byA is completely within B (where B is a human created legal entity or

similar such as a county)

“Contained by” is inverse of

“Contains”

taxonomic

mereonomic

spatial

A glossary (“knowledge glossary”), comprising two tables, is developed:

Table of concepts (core and secondary, definitions, sources).

Table of relations.





Table of relations: an excerpt.



•Formal (i.e.

machine-readable) specification of

the domain


The knowledge glossary, although explicit and shared (at least in principle), is not a formal specification of the domain.

For the computational aspects, was used.

Concepts are arranged hierarchically (classes and subclasses).

Classes and subclasses (sets of concepts) are:

Defined according to the knowledge glossary.

Connected one another by means of the relations defined in the glossary.

Classes and subclasses.



•Formal (i.e.


the domain


The knowledge glossary, although explicit and shared (at least in principle), is not a formal specification of the domain.

For the computational aspects, was used.

Concepts are arranged hierarchically (classes and subclasses).

Classes and subclasses (sets of concepts) are:

Defined according to the knowledge glossary.

Connected one another by means of the relations defined in the glossary.

Slots are used:

To describe classes, subclasses and instances.

To assign relationships.

Example: descriptive and relational slots of the class “Building”.



The construction of the ontology continues with the creation of instances and the filling-in of the values of the slots.•Formal (i.e.


the domain


An example of instance belonging to the class “Building”.


5. AN ONTOLOGY OF THE AA OF MASTERPLANS

The ontology is now fully and formally defined.

It can be continually adjusted and integrated.

It can be represented graphically by means of graph trees that can be tailored to the user’s needs.

•Formal (i.e.


the domain



6. CONCLUSIONS

Strong points:

•This approach provides all the participants involved in the process with a better understanding of the domain (Uschold & Gruninger, 1996), through an iterative learning process that is, in principle, inclusive, because the construction of the glossary can be improved by integrating the definition of concepts, relations, and descriptive attributes, in a participative way. Such a collective conceptualization of the domain would also greatly improve the chances of sharing and reusing the ontology in the domain field.

•This ontology can be updated, refined and reused in the given domain (Agarwal,

2005), and it can lay the bases for the development of task-dependent or application-oriented ontologies in the same domain, for instance focusing on administrative and procedural tasks.

•This ontology effectively supports, as desired, the analytic description of the historic centers’ built environment and open spaces.

C. Zoppi & S.Lai “An ontology of the Appropriate Assessment of municipal masterplans. A case study concerning Sardinia, Italy”

6 - CONCLUSIONS

Building Building code Area (m2) Height (m) Volume (m

3) Construction year

A A.E.2.A 96,80 3,70 278,04 pre 1950

Basement Basement use Ground floor Ground floor use residential Upper floor(s) 1 Upper floor(s) use residential

Car entrance gate Walls: materials

stone Walls: finishes

none

Doors: materials Windows: materials

Blinds

Roof: geometry pitched roof Roof: structure wood Roof: finishes

traditional tiles

Roof orientation North-East South-West

Annotations about the building

Structural obsolescence

Functional obsolescence

Image obsolescence

Global assessment

poor poor good Traditional – permanently altered

Allowed construction activities

Routine maintenance Characterization: Front courtyard – side entry Extraordinary maintenance

Restoration work Prescriptions

Refurbishment

New construction

Demolition

Change of permitted use

MINIMUM UNIT “A.E.2”

BUILDING “A.E.2.A”


6. CONCLUSIONS

Strong points:

•This approach provides all the participants involved in the process with a better understanding of the domain (Uschold & Gruninger, 1996), through an iterative learning process that is, in principle, inclusive, because the construction of the glossary can be improved by integrating the definition of concepts, relations, and descriptive attributes, in a participative way. Such a collective conceptualization of the domain would also greatly improve the chances of sharing and reusing the ontology in the domain field.

•This ontology can be updated, refined and reused in the given domain (Agarwal,

2005), and it can lay the bases for the development of task-dependent or application-oriented ontologies in the same domain, for instance focusing on administrative and procedural tasks.

•This ontology effectively supports, as desired, the analytic description of the historic centers’ built environment and open spaces.

•The ontological approach here utilized can be readily exported and reused to describe in detail features and characteristics of historical settlements, although the domain ontology here developed is grounded on the normative framework that regulates IPCHs in Italy & Sardinia.

Limitations:

•Definitions of concepts are heavily based on Italian regulations, technical documents and dictionaries, which can raise issues of semantic precision in English.

Corrado Zoppi & Sabrina LaiUniversità di Cagliari - Dipartimento di Ingegneria Civile, Ambientale e ArchitetturaVia Marengo, 2 – 09123 Cagliari, ItalyTel.: +39 070 6755216/6755206, telefax: +39 070 [email protected]; [email protected]

Eighth International Conference onInformatics and Urban and Regional Planning

Naples, June 4-6, 2014

Smart City: planning for energy, transportation and sustainability of the urban system

An ontology of the Appropriate Assessment of …Corrado Zoppi & Sabrina Lai Università di Cagliari...

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