Action C21 of the European programme for Cooperation in the field of Scientific and Technical Research (COST - http://www.cost.esf.org/) is dedicated to investigating urban ontologies for an improved communication in urban civil engineering projects. The Action, known informally as "Towntology", brings together a large and heterogeneous grouping from across Europe, whose interests range from construction to urban tourism and from transport infrastructure to resource visualisation. On 6-7 November 2006, in Geneva, the Action convened a successful workshop to address emerging issues in the field. This volume presents the contributions to that workshop, in many cases revised afterwards to capture some of the outcomes of discussion.

Many of these contributions are from members of the Towntology group, but there are also contributions from other European researchers, and from researchers in the US. The volume represents a valuable overview of major current issues in the field of urban ontologies and encapsulates many useful and different approaches. We hope that it will serve not only as a worthy outcome of Action C21, but also as a valuable resource for a wide range of researchers.

Resent results in Ontologies in Urban Development Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Inhalt
Ontologies for an Improved Communication in Urban Development Projects.- Keynote Reflections.- COST Action C20 Urban Knowledge Arena: Cross-boundary Knowledge and Know-how on Complex Urban Problems.- Pre-consensus Ontologies and Urban Databases.- How Formal Ontology can help Civil Engineers.- Urban Planning Ontologies.- Ontology for Land Development Decisions and Plans.- An Ontology-based Model for Urban Planning Communication.- Towntology & hydrOntology: Relationship between Urban and Hydrographic Features in the Geographic Information Domain.- Urban Morphology and Systems.- Visualizing the Uncertainty of Urban Ontology Terms.- Preliminary insights on continuity and evolution of concepts for the development of an urban morphological process ontology.- Theoretical approach to urban ontology: a contribution from urban system analysis.- A socio-cultural ontology for urban development.- Engineering Methods for Ontologies.- Investigating a Bottom-up Approach for Extracting Ontologies from Urban Databases.- Urban Ontologies: the Towntology Prototype towards Case Studies.- Building an Address Gazetteer on top of an Urban Network Ontology.- Architecture and Construction Sector.- Pre-Ontology Considerations for Communication in Construction.- Ontology Based Communications Through Model Driven Tools: Feasibility of the MDA Approach in Urban Engineering Projects.- Modelization of the conception and conception of the model in architecture.