Urban IoT Ontologies for Sharing and Electric Mobility

Tracking #: 2801-4015

Authors: 
Mario Scrocca
Ilaria Baroni
Irene Celino

Responsible editor: 
Guest Editors Transportation Data 2020

Submission type: 
Ontology Description
Abstract: 
Cities worldwide are facing the challenge of digital information governance: different and competing service providers operating Internet of Things (IoT) devices often produce and maintain large amounts of data related to the urban environment. As a consequence, the need for interoperability arises between heterogeneous and distributed information, to enable city councils to make data-driven decisions and to provide new and effective added value services to their citizens. In this paper, we present the Urban IoT suite of ontologies, a common conceptual model to harmonise the data exchanges between municipalities and service providers, with specific focus on the sharing mobility and electric mobility domains.
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Tags: 
Reviewed

Decision/Status: 
Accept

Solicited Reviews:
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Review #1
Anonymous submitted on 14/Jun/2021
Suggestion:
Accept
Review Comment:

The paper is very clear and well-written. All the issues have been solved and I consider that the ontologies and their motivation are clearly described. Moreover, decisions on ontology were also added to the paper. It is high quality and interesting paper.

Review #2
By Maxime Lefrançois submitted on 21/Jun/2021
Suggestion:
Accept
Review Comment:

The authors took into account all my comments on the previous version of this article, and also the other reviewers' comments.

One last minor issue: acronym SOSA is defined p10, but used before.

I do recommend this article for publication in the Semantic Web Journal.

Review #3
By Emilia Lenzi submitted on 21/Jul/2021
Suggestion:
Accept
Review Comment:

This is the second revision of the article “Urban IoT Ontologies for Sharing and Electric Mobility”.

The paper describes a modular suite of ontologies representing data gathered from Urban IoT devices used in urban mobility, finally producing a conceptual model to harmonize data exchanges between municipalities and service providers, with a specific focus on sharing and electric mobility domains. The paper also describes the methodology followed for the development of the ontology and contains a set of examples and references to additional materials to better understand installation, queries, and evaluation of the model.

In the previous revision I emphasized the clarity of the exposition, and the relevance of the covered topics. In fact, no major changes to the structure of the paper were required, since it was already well organized. As far as the writing is concerned, therefore, authors basically corrected the typos and missing references that had been highlighted in the review.
However, in my previous review, I underlined some shortcomings in the section of result evaluation dealing with Completeness. The authors have now added the file CompetencyQuestion_Completeness.xlsx to the repository, including numerous Competency Question examples on most of the classes of the ontology. This is indeed a useful tool to test the Completeness of the model, therefore my only advice is to replace the full file with a link to a google sheet in read-only mode. I suggest this because from git hub it is not possible to view an xlsx file directly, unless you install git hub desktop: you can only download the excel locally, which may not be the ideal solution for users and information security.
As for the long-term stable URL for resources, these are all organized in the git hub repository, introduced by a bilingual read_me. Moreover, the subfolders contain read_me description in English and/or properly commented code. The contents of each file are clear and consistent with the descriptions. I give a more than positive assessment to the material provided, and the same suggestion made for the CompetencyQuestion_Completeness.xlsx file applies to all the other xlsx files.
This new paper also complies with all my other suggestions.

In conclusion, my final recommendation is to accept the paper. Indeed, such an example of integration of ontologies and the use of existing vocabularies meets the needs of the users it refers to and clearly describes the context of reference, resulting in a good quality and relevance model. Moreover, its modularity also allows for future extension.
Therefore, although its originality is not extraordinary, I appreciate not only the effort at the technical level, but also the detail and care in organizing heterogeneous data in the repository, and in explaining the problems and challenges faced and the results obtained. In fact, the work is complete and well documented.