The Role of Ontologies in Publishing and Analyzing City Indicators

This paper addresses the problem of how city indicators and their supporting data are to be published on the Semantic Web so that automated analysis can be performed. With the publishing of ISO 37120, cities have a standard set of indicators that can be used to compare their performance. The problem is that no standards exist for publishing indicators on the Semantic Web. In this paper we introduce the Global City Indicator Ontology (GCIO). The GCIO addresses five issues: 1) how is meta-data associated with a single indicator value represented? 2) how are indicator definitions represented? 3) how is the data used to derive an indicator value represented? 4) how is indicator theme specific knowledge represented, and 5) how is city specific knowledge represented? The GCIO has been implemented and validated using the City of Toronto ISO 37120 indicators reported for 2013. Research continues in developing ontologies specifically for each of the indicator themes such as: Education, Shelter, Health, Transportation and Innovation.