Semantic Cities
Papers from the 2012 AAAI Workshop
Biplav Srivastava, Freddy Lecue, Anupam Joshi, Workshop Cochairs
Technical Report WS-12-13
54 pp., $25.00
ISBN 978-1-57735-578-6
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Cities around the world aspire to provide superior quality of life to their citizens. An increasing number have realized that opening access to their data, and building semantic models to abstract as well as interconnect them can unleash economic growth while addressing sustainability issues. We call cities that enable such capabilities "semantic cities."
In a semantic city, available resources are harnessed safely, sustainably and efficiently to achieve positive, measurable economic and societal outcomes. Enabling city information as a utility, through a robust (expressive, dynamic, scalable) and (critically) a sustainable technology and socially synergistic ecosystem could drive significant benefits and opportunities. Data (and then information and knowledge) from people, systems and things is the single most scalable resource available to city stakeholders to reach the objective of semantic cities.
Two major trends are supporting semantic cities — open data and semantic web. "Open data is the idea that certain data should be freely available to everyone to use and republish as they wish, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control." A number of cities and government have made their data publicly available, prominent being London (UK), Chicago (USA), Washington DC (USA), and Dublin (Ireland). Semantic web as the technology to interconnect heterogeneous data has matured and it is being increasingly used in the form of linked open data and formal ontologies. Thus, a play-field for more AI research-driven technologies for cities has emerged.