REPRESENTING THE SOCIAL CHARACTER OF PLACES: ONTOLOGY MODELS OF THE URBAN ENVIRONMENT

The thesis aimed at rendering machine understandable the social dimension of urban places to provide a new generation of urban analytics based on peoples’ socio- spatial behaviour. The main outcome has been a formal framework, encoded in the form of Ontology Design Patterns, to represent the interaction between the architectural aspects of the city, its form, and the behaviour of city dwellers. Ontology models are based on place theories discussed by social and cultural geographers - such as Henri Lefevbre, Edward Soja and Doreen Massey - and experimented in a knowledge discovery pipeline by exploring geographic crowdsourced data coming from the TripAdvisor platform