About quality of semantic data for the city logistics domain

Abstract

City logistics is characterized as a distributed decision making system due to its heterogeneous stakeholders and their conflicting objectives. To understand the complexity of interactions among these stakeholders, the first step is taken by developing an ontology for city logistics domain. Ontology is a powerful way to express domain knowledge in a structured way and it can be treated as a knowledge meta-data model. To utilize this powerful knowledge model one needs to have confidence in its structural and relational information. Confidence in using ontology can be built by validating the ontology for its scope, structure and knowledge representation. In this paper, quantitative evaluation and qualitative validation of generic city logistics ontology is performed. Quantitative evaluation estimates ontology parameters such as depth, breadth, inheritance richness, relationship richness and attribute richness. To check the quality of the ontology, we propose to validate system components and knowledge representation in the ontology. For this purpose, we use the data collected from interviews consisting real-world stakeholders as well as more than 30 urban freight models and various other urban freight literature. More specifically, we explore how (and how many of) these rules and processes found in the real world domain are incorporated in the city logistics ontology. Finally, in the case of city logistics, we conclude that the ontology covers a wide scope of the domain and its generic nature allows flexibility of use for the purpose of knowledge sharing, querying and modellin