Claudine Métral

An Ontology-based Model for Urban Planning Communication

Urban planning projects are complex and involve multiple actors ranging from urban planners to inhabitants. These actors differ greatly in their background or their centres of interest. The main objective of our research is various actors involved. With this intention, we defined an ontology-based model whose main characteristics are, on the one hand, the semantic integration in a knowledge base of the urban knowledge coming from various sources such as GIS databases, master plans, local plans or any other document and, on the other hand, the modelling of the centre of interest of an urban actor. This models can then be used to generate adapted user interfaces to present the interests.

Ontology Based Communications Through Model Driven Tools: Feasibility of the MDA Approach in Urban Engineering Projects

Enterprises today face many challenges related to lack of interoperability. Enterprise applications and software systems need to be interoperable in order to achieve seamless business across organisational boundaries and thus achieve virtual networked organisations. IEEE defines interoperability as “the ability of two or more systems or components to exchange information and to use the information that has been exchanged”. MDA is the OMG instantiation of an approach to software development kown as Model Driven Engineering (MDE) or Model Driven Development (MDD). MDD focuses on Models as the primary artefacts in the development process, with Transformations as the primary operation on models, used to map information from one model to another. There is presently an important paradigm shift in the field of software engineering that may have important consequences on the way information systems are built and maintained. Model-driven development (MDD), and in particular OMGs Model-Driven Architecture ® (MDA®), is emerging as the state of practice for developing modern enterprise applications and software systems. The MDD paradigm improves the way of addressing and solving interoperability issues compared to earlier non-modelling approaches. However, developing correct and useful models is not an easy task. We believe that there is a need for an interoperability framework that provides guidance on how MDD should be applied to address interoperability. A key to the success of MDD is the development of ontologies supporting the mapping from one model to another, either at the same level of abstraction or at different levels. Various approaches have been proposed and tested, starting from common ontologies, shared by all the models, to local ontologies, specific to each software. We propose here to discuss the applicability of MDD to the urban civil engineering (UCE) field. This should help to establish the requirements for ontologies to be applied for interoperability of systems commonly used in this domain. In the first section of this paper, we briefly introduce some key principles of the MDA approach and the role of ontologies in model transformation approaches. The following section describes the Model Driven Development (MDD) interoperability framework. The last part presents a way of applying the MDA techniques to urban civil engineering projects, with the objective of testing the feasibility and relevancy of the approach to this domain.

A repository of information visualization techniques to support the design of 3D virtual city models

Virtual 3D city models are used for different applications such as urban planning, navigation, pedestrian behaviour, historical information, and disaster management. These applications require rich information models that associate urban objects not only with their geometric properties but also with other types of information. When designing such models the choice of visualization techniques is far from trivial because the city objects must be displayed together with additional information, such as historical facts, planning projects, pollutant concentration, noise level, etc. Finding relevant techniques depends on a set of criteria such as the type of information, but also on the tasks that will be performed and the associated context. Furthermore, a technique that is relevant when used in isolation may generate visual incompatibilities when used in conjunction with another one. We have defined a model for the representation of information visualization techniques in 3D city models. We have implemented this model in the form of an ontology and a knowledge base of techniques currently used in 3D city models or 3D GIS. The goal of such an approach is to provide a knowledge repository to support the design of 3D virtual city models in which non-geometric information must be presented. In this paper we describe the model and the ontology of information visualization techniques that we designed. We also show how the associated knowledge base can be used for the selection of visualization techniques depending on different criteria including task and context, and for the detection of visual incompatibilities between techniques when used in the same scene. * Corresponding author.

Ontologies for Interconnecting Urban Models

Various accurate urban models have been developed and are used in the urban field, to perform for example air quality calculation, building energy consumption or traffic simulation. 3D city models representing the structure of a city in three dimensions are special urban models issued from 3D GIS (3 Dimensional Geographic Information Systems). The use of urban models, particularly 3D city models, is increasing in urban planning. The consequence of an integrated approach in urban planning is the use of different models, most of the time in an interconnected way able to simulate the urban issues together with their inter-relations.

Une infrastructure d'évaluation pour des techniques de représentation de l'information non-géométrique dans les environnements virtuels 3D

Augmenting 3D virtual environments with non-geometrical information improves our understanding of geometrical objects and links between objects in order to perform tasks which require non-geometric information and a 3D scene at the same time. Many interactive presentation techniques have been devised to incorporate non-geometric information into 3D virtual environments. Our main objective is to create an evaluation grid to be used for comparing the usability of techniques according to the information to display, the geometrical context and the task. In this article, we present an evaluation framework that we have developed in order to perform usability tests. These tests will let us fill-in the evaluation grid for the representation techniques of non-geometric information.