A Foundation Ontology for Global City Indicators

Speaker:        Professor Mark S. Fox
                Professor of Industrial Engineering
                Senior Fellow, Global Cities Institute
                Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering
                University of Toronto

Title:          "A Foundation Ontology for Global City Indicators"

Date:           Monday, 7 October 2013

Time:           4:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:          Lecture Theater F (near lifts 25/26), HKUST

Abstract:

Cities are moving towards policy-making based on data. Today there are
thousands of different sets of city performance indicators and hundreds of
agencies compiling and reviewing them. However, these indicators are
usually not standardized, consistent or comparable (over time or across
cities). In response to this challenge, the Global City Indicator Facility
was created by the World Bank at the University of Toronto, to define a
set of city indicators that can be consistently applied globally. Over
250 cities worldwide are participating in this effort. This talk describes
the effort to create an ontology for city indicators. The ontology
integrates over 10 ontologies from across the semantic web, including
geonames, measurement theory, statistics, time, provenance, validity and
trust. It extends these ontologies, where appropriate, to satisfy the
ontology's competency requirements. The ontology is defined in OWL, and
implemented in a prolog RDF server. In addition, a set of consistency
axioms are defined and implemented to perform tests not possible using the
OWL axiomatization.

*****************
Biography:

Dr. Fox received his BSc in Computer Science from the University of
Toronto in 1975 and his PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon
University in 1983. He is a founding member of the Robotics Institute of
Carnegie Mellon University, the founding Director of the Intelligent
Systems Laboratory within the Institute and the founding Director of the
Center for Integrated Manufacturing Decision Systems. He co-founded
Carnegie Group Inc. in 1984, a software company that specialized in
knowledge-based systems for solving engineering, manufacturing, and
telecommunications problems, and was its Vice-President of Engineering and
President/CEO. In 1991, Dr. Fox returned to the University of Toronto
where he was appointed the NSERC Research Chairholder in Enterprise
Integration and Professor of Industrial Engineering. In 1992, he was
appointed Director of the Collaborative Program in Integrated
Manufacturing and in 1993, Dr. Fox co-founded and was CEO of Novator
Systems Ltd., a pioneer in E-Retail software and services.

Dr. Fox's research has led to the creation of the field of
Constraint-Directed Scheduling within Artificial Intelligence, and several
commercially successful scheduling systems and companies. He also
pioneered the application of Artificial Intelligence to project
management, simulation, and material design. He was the designer of one of
the first commercial industrial applications of expert systems:
PDS/GENAID, a steam turbine and generator diagnostic system for
Westinghouse, which was a recipient of the IR100 in 1985 and is still in
commercial use at Siemens. He was the co-creator of the Knowledge
Representation SRL from which Knowledge Craft? and ROCK?, commercial
knowledge engineering tools, were derived, and KBS from which several
commercial knowledge based simulation tools are derived. His current
research focuses on the ontologies and common sense reasoning and their
application to Smart Cities.

Dr. Fox was elected a Fellow of Association for the Advancement of
Artificial Intelligence in 1991, a Joint Fellow of the Canadian Institute
for Advanced Research and PRECARN in 1992, and a Fellow of the Engineering
Institute of Canada in 2009. He is a past AAAI councillor, and a member of
ACM and IEEE. Dr. Fox has published over 100 papers.