Towards an Ontology for Crowds Description: A Proposal Based on Description Logic
The research context of this paper refers to bottom–up approaches to crowd dynamics that is, the study of how and where crowds form and move [1]. Several phenomena like crowd aggregation, dispersion and self–organized movement have been observed and studi
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e research context of this paper refers to bottom–up approaches to crowd dynamics that is, the study of how and where crowds form and move [1]. Several phenomena like crowd aggregation, dispersion and self–organized movement have been observed and studied by multiple disciplines interested to crowds (e.g. physics, sociology, ethology, social and behavioral psychology, building design, urban planning, security management, among others), each one with its specific viewpoint and ontological setting. SCA4CROWDS is an interdisciplinary research within this context that aims at contributing towards the development of a unifying ontology on crowds allowing the integration of contributions coming from several disciplines and that could be exploited for scientific and applicative issues (e.g. model comparison, validation, calibration). Potential exploitations of SCA4CROWDS results are towards the support of design and management of public crowded spaces and events to improve security, safety and comfort of people. SCA4CROWDS, in particular, aims at developing formal and computational tools to support the design, execution and analysis of crowds’ behavior as effect of individual interactions (e.g. physical, social, emotional) according to Situated Cellular Agent (SCA) [2]. SCA is a modeling and simulation framework to model and study crowd dynamics phenomena with an approach based on Multi–Agent Systems (MAS) and Cellular Automata [3] principles. In this paper we present the ontological framework for crowds’ study we developed according to Elias Canetti work [4], in which a classification and ontological description of the crowd has been proposed as result of 40–years of empirical observations and studies from psychological and anthropological viewpoints. In crowds and CA literature, a formal analysis with CA-based models of theories developed within human sciences context has previously been proposed in [9]. Elias Canetti can be considered as belonging to the tradition of social studies that refer to the crowd as an entity dominated by uniform moods and feelings. We preferred this work among others (see for instance [5,6,7,8]) due to its clear semantics and explicit reference to concepts of loss of individuality, crowd uniformity, spatio-temporal dynamics and discharge, that could be fruitfully represented by modeling approaches like SCA and Cellular Automata in general. In the following we introduce a formal language belonging to the family of Description Logics (DL [10]) that we propose for the formal representation of conceptual description of crowds and their dynamic phenomena. Description Logics is a family of knowledge representation languages that are used to develop various applications to the issues of data management, including: expressing the H. Umeo et al. (Eds): ACRI 2008, LNCS 5191, pp. 538–541, 2008. c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008
Towards an Ontology for Crowds Description
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conceptual domain model/ontology of the data source, integrating multiple data sources, and expressing and evaluating querie
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