Digiplaza: A 2,5D Virtual Environment to Support the Sense of Locality of Geographic Communities Using an Ontologic Approach

Today, there is a growing interest in using online communities to support either social interaction or Public Administration (PA) digital inclusion, both in geography-based communities and geographically distributed users of the Internet. In this paper we present a pseudo 3D (2,5D) configurable virtual environment that uses the "plaza metaphor" to virtually represent the natural place where citizens meet and socialize. Information exchanged among users generates a lot of data difficult to store in a structured way. We propose the use of ontologies to categorize data in order to provide to the user the right information according to his/her specific profile, context and location. The advantages of the proposed approach are an improvement of the users' "Sense of Locality" and a better and more direct relationship between citizens and Public Administration.