Towards an ontology for crowds description: A proposal based on description logic

he 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. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.