Formal ontologies and strategic environmental assessment. A case study: the municipal land use plan of Genoa

In the field of environmental assessment methods and tools, the space-based information systems have increasing importance, due to their capacity to organize knowledge according both to the representation of the urban and regional spatial systems (land use, settlement dynamics, urban metabolism) and to the representation of environmental components, normally expressed through a set of indicators (critical factors, vulnerability, etc.). In environmental assessment, the complexity of the cognitive frameworks is a central issue. The problem to represent within a single logic information system sets of data referring to different phenomena onto a spatial dimension, can be usefully implemented through the use of formal ontologies. In the case of evaluation processes in which decisions about land use must be compared with the state of the environment and the potential environmental impacts (also in their spatial dimension), one is faced with the problem of extracting data from the base built for the representation of structured information systems that determine the environmental factors (localized) of the vulnerability of various environmental components. Similarly, the comparison between environmental spatial data and land use and zoning maps should be built on the same type of spatial and semantic logic. Useful tools that can tie together the environmental dimension with the land uses is a GIS methodology are those that are based on formal ontologies. Through this technique of conceptualization, it becomes possible to consider the environmental assessment as a single process.