Ontologies for Cities of Future - The quest of formalizing interaction rules of urban phenomena

A city can not be designed" Watanabe [1]: our ambition can be at the maximum to guide someway and in some part its growth. So as planners need tools to aid an open design with uncertain goals. This research group begin to develop such a tool at high level of abstraction (Fioravanti 2008), with the aim of investigating the potentiality of a collaboration among complementary research domains. The present work reports about early implementation results of an innovative approach developed by the authors, for representation of design knowledge. It has been identified in the Urban Design Ontology (Montenegro and Duarte 2009) some design entities and their internal relationships that have been formalized and visualized by means of an intuitive interface. As a matter of fact, this approach, by means of inference engines allows coherence's check and constraint verification, pointing out incompatibility between initial design program and each partial specialist design solution and/or the overall shared one.