Semantic integration of urban mobility data for supporting visualization

Abstract This paper proposes an ontology-based approach to support the process of visualizing urban mobility data. The approach consists of building a visualization-oriented urban mobility ontology, focused on themes such as ridership, vehicle flows and the like. Existing ontologies focus on modelling the overall structure of transportation networks, and do not address the formalization of such themes. The ontology also allows characterizing visualization techniques with human perception factors, so that they can be used to automatically infer recommended techniques for a dataset. The ultimate goal is to benefit decision makers, by providing an ontology that can assist with the process of developing semantically-rich visualizations, with increased data interoperability and knowledge extraction capabilities. We provide an example with real data of the public transportation system of the city of Porto, Portugal. The example shows the semantic characterization of a visualization technique, and how semantics can assist the task of automatically recommending visualizations.