A domain ontology for construction concepts in urban infrastructure products

Domain ontologies are the cornerstone of informatics systems. Like their philosophical counterparts, they aim at providing a shared representation (language) for the concepts within a domain of knowledge. Ontologies are related more to knowledge representation rather than reasoning. Consequently, they normally can be complemented by artificial intelligence tools to enhance their decision support capabilities. This paper presents an ontology that is an abstract (yet extendable) philosophical (yet practical) conceptualization of the essence of knowledge that relates to construction aspects of infrastructure products. A product is the outcome of any work process and includes physical products, decisions, abstract knowledge and knowledge items generated based on all of these. A set of related constraints, mechanism, actors and process are identified along with these products. Product attributes and modalities are also presented to help describe the behavior of these products and support the generation of types or classes of these products.

Research highlights
► A domain ontology is developed for representing infrastructure products.
► Subject matter experts confirmed the suitability of the ontology.
► Ontology extendibility is proven through creation of an application ontology.