Ontological Modeling of Infrastructure Products and Related Concepts

The large number of infrastructure renewal projects taking place along congested urban transportation corridors poses several challenges for all project proponents. As such, closer integration of processes between all stakeholders is required throughout a project life cycle. This integration can be accomplished through enhancing interorganizational information interoperability. This paper presents ontologies, an emerging tool that is gaining momentum in the computer science field and has great potential to facilitate knowledge sharing and interoperability. A four-layer distributed ontology for representing infrastructure products and related concepts is presented. The root level is a representation of the abstract superclasses (entities and supporting concepts) on which the next levels construct their semantics. The next two levels are considered ontologies specific to the domain of infrastructure products but are created at different levels of detail to maintain consistency with other ontology development efforts. The final level is the application ontology that uses the core knowledge defined at the domain level to create sets of task-specific ontologies. In this paper, an urban infrastructure design coordination ontology is presented. The ontology was then used to build a collaborative system based on the geographic information system to support design coordination of utilities along urban transportation corridors. The system demonstrates how ontologies can be used to streamline the utility design coordination process among utility companies and municipalities.