Ontology-Based Demand Support Systems for Urban Development

Abstract

Demand support systems (DSSs) can help clients by presenting design solutions using virtual reality, and by offering relevant feedback such as costs, energy usage, distances and density. Using these systems, clients and stakeholders can run 'what-if' scenarios on different design solutions and see the consequences of their changes. To make sure that a DSS is suitable, it needs to cope with the project situation at hand. This paper investigates DSSs that can be built 'on-site' and that are flexible enough to model project-specific issues. A custom-built DSS can be tailored for each project. Therefore this paper explores the use of ontologies. The use of an ontology enables further reuse of software components and software models. With this approach, several parts of software components can be reused and put together to quickly develop a customised DSS. This paper describes this approach and demonstrates a prototype implementation that is useful for urban design projects in early design phases.