Design of a spatial database to analyze the forms and responsiveness of an urban environment using an ontological approach

This paper introduces a spatial database and ontology-enabled framework that models and operationalizes the relation between urban forms and their responsiveness to the needs of its user. The objective is to offer a framework that provides a practical implementation of the concept of responsive environment introduced by Bentley, Alcock, Murrain, McGlynn and Smith (1985) in order to provide enough reusability and flexibility to reflect different urban modeling viewpoints and conceptualizations. The developed system is organized in three modules: the first and second modules model the ontology of a responsive environment and the layout of an urban environment while the third module is a spatial database that supports further computational analysis of urban forms. We applied several spatial data metrics that analyze the structural properties of urban forms and the emerging opportunities as identified by the notion of responsive environments. The framework is experimented and applied to the district 12, region 4 of the city of Tehran in Iran. The modeling abstractions lead to the generation of several semantic bridge rules and map layers that reflect different levels of urban responsiveness. The emerging patterns are qualitatively evaluated and found to be correlated with inhabitants' own perception of an urban environment. The results show that the suggested framework can be applied to the analysis of the responsive environments of urban forms.