Towards an ontology for designing cycling routes in the city of Puerto Madryn

Increasing urban cycling rates has become a main objective of mobility policies due to its contribution to social equity and sustainable urban travel. This objective can only be achieved if the activity is perceived as safe and convenient. The design of cycling routes projecting this perception depends on knowing how people move in the city and what the city looks like. However, acquiring such knowledge is challenging since it is distributed in an open set of heterogeneous data sources belonging to a variety of organizations. This paper documents the first step in an ontology-based data access (OBDA)approach to this problem, i.e., it describes the development of an ontology to support the design of cycling routes in the city of Puerto Madryn. We assume a set of competence questions that urban designers are likely to formulate in this context to understand the mobility needs of Puerto Madryn's inhabitants and the different alternatives they have to design cycling routes covering such needs. We derive concepts, relations, attributes and instances from these questions and characterize them using natural language. We specify the resulting ontology using Graphol, a graphic language for OWL 2 developed as part of an OBDA tool stack.