Standards Development

Scope

This document defines an ontology for service level concepts for housing using terms specified in ISO/IEC 5087-1 and 5087-2.

Purpose

Is there a verified market need for the proposal?

Available housing is one of the core basic needs of each person. Multiple services in a city use the data relevant to housing, such as urban planning, city transportation planning, public safety, energy management, etc. Data has played a central, critical role in a city’s ability to optimize resource use and support smart decision-making and service delivery. Nevertheless, cities and organizations have had to develop information systems based on independent data model to support their activities. Various SDOs have developed some standards for residential buildings and dwellings, including houses acoustic, facility security, wastewater services, residential building energy management and saving and sheltered housing for seniors. Yet none of them address the critical issue of defining a shared data model for housing that reduces the time to create the necessary information systems while achieving interoperability amongst them. They are often faced with a variety of purpose-built systems that were not designed to interoperate. Precise and unambiguous representation and communication of data generated in housing is critical to sharing and use in multiple services. What problem does this document solve?

Various data produced by housing lack a unified and precise representation, which leads to a lack of semantic interoperability between different systems in multiple domains. It is one of the major obstacles in the cross-domain systems and service systems.

This document defines a shared data model for representing the data such that it supports interoperability/integration across systems. By using ontologies to define a common data model that provides precision in the representation of knowledge in the housing domain, we can address data issues such as semantic ambiguity, data provenance, validity, trust in sources, and uncertain authenticity when communicating and sharing housing data with other services.

The common data model makes it easy to transfer, exchange, transform, aggregate, and integrate related data on housing without the aid of semantic mediation. This will enable different stakeholders to access and understand the data unambiguously. Effectively managing and controlling the data generated in housing and coordinating the use of housing data is conducive to improving the work efficiency of other city services.

What value will the document bring to end-users?

The specification of a City Data Model for housing will provide precise, unambiguous definitions and representations of housing-relevant data for cross-city service sharing. It will enable city software applications to share information, plan, coordinate, and perform city tasks, and support decisionmaking within and across city services. This requires a clear understanding of the terms used to define the data and the relationships between them. Therefore, it is necessary to establish standardized, shared, easy-to-use and systematic ontologies in the domain of housing to represent the information needed by other services. This provides consistency in the interpretation and use of the data across independently developed software systems. Improved data consistency will make it easier to share data between different information systems used in multiple services. Ontology is used to establish a public data model, to associate core concepts in the housing domain, to fully explore the value of data, to realize efficient utilization of data, and to improve collaborative efficiency, which can provide more added value to data. This effectively reduces the difficulty of data integration and helps multiple stakeholders make scientific decisions.

The city data model is stratified into three levels of abstraction. Part 1 of the 5087 series of standards focuses on the Foundation Level. It covers very general concepts such as Time, Location, and Activity. Part 2 focuses on the City Level and covers concepts that are general to cities and span all services such as Households, Transportation Infrastructure, and Land Use. Subsequent Parts for Service Level span concepts commonly associated with a particular service but still shared with other services.

This proposal will be a new part of the ISO/IEC 5087 series of standards. It defines the classes, properties, and logical computational definitions for representing housing domain concepts used by other services across the city using terms specified in ISO/IEC 5087-1 and 5087-2. When information relevant to housing is shared and used, this standard tells how to represent information, including personal information. It does not prescribe that personal information must be represented. The portions of this standard used are determined by the city and country and guided by their privacy policies.