How Formal Ontology can help Civil Engineers

In this paper we report some considerations on the developing relationship between the area of formal ontology and that of urban development. Even in the studies on urban and territorial systems we register a phenomenon common to most applied domains: the increasing interest on ontology and the difficulties to understand its novelty. Indeed, the area of applied ontology spans a variety of methods and ideas, some of which have been developed much earlier in other approaches. This older group of 'ontological tools' (among which we find classification methods, taxonomic organization, graph and lattice theories) are well-known techniques and form the basis of most university programs (from engineering to geography, from computer science to cognitive science). It is natural that the domain experts that want to introduce applied ontology to their domain find easy to get hold of these old techniques since, in a sense, these are already part of their background. Unfortunately, these techniques have already reached their limits and now have little to say in ontology research:1 they are substantially the same as thirty or forty years ago (even relatively recent proposals like dynamic taxonomies are just innovative applications of well-known knowledge techniques).