A Proposal of an Event Ontology for Urban Crowd Profiling

The definitions of "event" and "crowd" are still representing controversial issues that have been tackled by different disciplines like Sociology, Philosophy and Computer Science. The proposed ontology of events takes advantage of results and perspectives already present in literature and in available resources, like DBpedia. Events, such as celebrations, concerts, sport matches and so on, are, in this work, defined as structured entities spatially and temporally confined, codified by a specific script, and participated by urban crowds. The integration of an ontology of "event" with an ontology of "crowd" constitutes the originality of this work. A conceptual framework has been defined, and then implemented in Protègè, to create a versatile tool to profile crowds. In the paper the assumptions that underline the development of the ontology are introduced, then its implementation in Protègè and its application to a case study is presented. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.