Conceptualizing Small and Medium-Sized Smart Cities in the Mediterranean Region: An Ontological Approach

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.