Web 3.0 and Knowledge Management: Opportunities for Spatial Planning and Decision Making

The overabundance of information produced by new technologies, if on one side can be considered as a knowledge enrichment in planning process, on the other side it has not improved neither reality understanding nor possibilities of intervention. Old forms of citizens participation to planning process, generally based on assemblies, have been replaced by continuous discussions on social networks, blogs, etc.. The attempt to take into account the huge data flow produced everyday, it is not an easy task for planners. An ontologies based approach can represent an important support to such activities. "Comelicopedia" an European project between Italy and Austria, probably is one of the first experiences in applying ontologies to spatial planning process. All potentialities in planning and decision making fields will be analyzed and tools, such as "comelicopedia", can become usual in supporting a regulatory dialogue between decision makers and citizens

An ontology of the appropriate assessment of Municipal master plans related to Sardinia (Italy)

This paper discusses some key points related to the ontology of the “Appropriate assessment” (under Directive 92/43/EEC of 21 May 1992, the so-called Habitats Directive) procedure concerning plans significantly affecting Natura 2000 sites. We study this ontology by discussing its implementation into the adjustment process of the Masterplans of the regional municipalities of Sardinia (Italy) to the Regional Landscape Plan (RLP), and put in evidence some important general observations, coming from the case study, concerning the utility and effectiveness of the ontological conceptual framework in order to help planners and decision makers understand and structure the assessment process of plans

Monitoring and modeling urban sprinkling: a new perspective of land take

According to the studies done until now on the recent urban transformation dynamics, namely urban sprinkling, this thesis aims to investigate the phenomenon from different points of view to bring out its unsustainable character. The urban dispersion phenomena, specific characteristic of low-density territories, will be examined through the sprinkling index by including new components in addition to the traditional settlement system components. It allows to evaluate the shape of the anthropic settlements and the distance between them which often results in fragmentation of the urban settlements which in turn generate landscape fragmentation. Nowadays, both in the proximity of large cities and in more external areas such as rural areas, there are often evidences of strong fragmentation of the anthropic settlements in which, even if the amount of occupied surface (land take) may not seem worrying, its configuration determines a general decrease in ecological connectivity, landscape quality and general degradation of soil functions. The general hypothesis is that fragmentation (of urban, landscape and habitat) can become an indicator of land take. In fact, it is not enough to consider only the loss of natural or agricultural areas, but also the distribution of buildings in the landscape matrix, i.e., its spatial component. An emblematic case is that of Basilicata region whose dynamics of transformation from the 50s to the present day will be investigated in this thesis. According to the latest report of the Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA 2020), the Basilicata region has only 3.15% of land consumption compared to the entire regional surface. This indicator is in contrast with the shape of the anthropic settlements which results fragmented and dispersed. It is essential that the effects of fragmentation as well as ecosystem disaggregation take on a "measurable" character, joining the list of indicators of urban and territorial quality such as land take and land consumption that European Union addresses to national communities currently consider essential and decisive to highlighting the efficiency/inefficiency of environmental and landscape management. It is crucial to understand and investigate what have been and will be in the future the most influential drivers on these dynamics that contribute intrinsically to land consumption and to define the addresses or the thresholds to contain this pulverized and disordered dissemination of anthropic settlements

Ontology and Spatial Planning

In last decades a key problem in adopting technologies in planning process was a chronic lack of data. But in recent times, such problem was inverted due to the overabundance of data produced in different periods, with various purposes, at multiple scales and with different cognitive models. This situation generated three types of barriers to data interoperability: bureaucratic, technological, semantic. While the first two issues have been solved taking various initiatives, the last one could be solved using ontologies. Concepts are the cornerstone of the ontology, but it is not easy to define a concept without any ambiguity, discordance or vagueness. A concept can be clear or not; ambiguity occurs when a concept is not much clear; while discordance arises when an agreement is missing. If the concept definition can present some incoherence, the broad boundaries model can be useful in Ontology representation. This model is an extension of the 9-intersection model used for the topological relationship among geographical objects. The model with broad boundaries deals with uncertainty in spatial data taking into account ill defined aspects. This model is based on the definitions of inner and broad boundaries. Using this model in Ontology field, the inner boundary is the edge of the part of a concept without doubts and the broad boundary is the grey zone, with a certain level of uncertainty, useful to represent ambiguity, discordance and vagueness. Topology rules represent the relationship among concepts. If two concepts are identical, the “equal” rule can be used; if they share some parts, the “overlap” rule is suitable. If two concepts are completely different, the “disjoint” rule can be applied. If a concept is a subset of another, there are several rules which can help us (“covers”, “covered by”, “contains” and “inside”). In case all concepts are clear, these relationships can be modelled using the 9-intersection model. The way to define the part of concept included inside the inner boundary and the other one included in the broad boundary can be achieved using rough set theory. All the aspects of a concept classified in the same way represent the indiscernible part of the concept and are included inside lower approximation (inner boundary). The remaining part represents an uncertainty zone and it falls within the upper approximation (outer boundary). The measure of the degree of uncertainty inside the upper approximation can be modelled using fuzzy set theory. This approach has been tested with several concepts particularly suitable to verify the hypothesis