---
id: ontologies/smart-city-ontology-mediterranean
about:
  label: >-
    Conceptualizing Small and Medium-Sized Smart Cities in the Mediterranean
    Region: An Ontological Approach
  description: >-
    A 2019 paper in the International Journal of E-Planning Research by
    Panagiotopoulou, Kokla and Stratigea of the National Technical University of
    Athens that extends an existing smart city ontology with concepts and
    relationships drawn from small and medium-sized Mediterranean cities.
  tags:
    - smart city
    - ontology
    - mediterranean
    - small cities
    - urban planning
    - paper
article:
  url: 'https://doi.org/10.4018/IJEPR.2019100102'
  published: '2019'
  publisher: International Journal of E-Planning Research (IGI Global)
  authors:
    - Maria Panagiotopoulou
    - Margarita Kokla
    - Anastasia Stratigea
domains:
  - places
provenance:
  origin: agent
  sources:
    - title: >-
        Conceptualizing Small and Medium-Sized Smart Cities in the Mediterranean
        Region: An Ontological Approach
      url: 'https://doi.org/10.4018/IJEPR.2019100102'
  created: '2026-10-19'
  reviewed: '2026-10-19'
  reviewed_by: >-
    Claude, from the abstract and citation details on the publisher page only;
    the full text is behind a paywall and was not read.
  status: draft
---
The paper starts from a gap: after a decade of interest in smart cities there is still no agreed definition. Definitions run from purely technological ones to much broader ones, and the authors say this lack of a shared vocabulary blocks semantic interoperability. They also note that technology-led smart city projects have often failed to deliver in several urban domains.

Their argument is that planning "smart" should fit the spatial and other particulars of a city and the way its subsystems interact, which means first understanding the city's ontology. The paper takes an existing smart city ontology and extends it with concepts and relationships taken from small and medium-sized cities in the Mediterranean. The aim is to set out the main drivers of such cities and how they relate, so that the smart city idea makes sense in that spatial context.

What a reader could take from it is the extended ontology itself: a vocabulary for describing a small or mid-sized Mediterranean city as a set of drivers and relations, which is the kind of structure a model of a place needs before data and engines come into it. The abstract does not name the ontology that was extended, nor say whether the result is published in a machine-readable form.

Published in volume 8, issue 4, pages 17 to 41. The full text is available through the publisher, by institutional access or purchase. In this wiki's stack it belongs with the ontologies, the layer between data and engines.