A land use identification and visualization tool driven by OWL ontologies

We present a software tool for urban planing, driven by semantic web ontologies. With this tool, the participants of the urban development process can semantically annotate an intervention site with knowledge about the use of the land. The tool provides the user as much flexibility as possible in the choice of the land use standard that will be used to perform the classifications. This flexibility is achieved by defining extensible ontologies in which the concrete standards can be built upon. This allows our tool to load external ontologies that define the taxonomy of the standard and the semantic relations between the land use categories. The loaded ontologies seamlessly integrate in the application, and are used through a friendly user interface. We ało demonstrate how ontologies can be used to perform automatic categorizations and consistency checks in the geographical knowledge, aiding in the process of identifying the land uses of a site.