ITcon Vol. 15, Special Issue Bringing urban ontologies into practice , pg. 159-168, http://www.itcon.org/2010/13

Updating plans: a historiography of decisions over time

SUBMITTED: July 2009
REVISED:
PUBLISHED: February 2010
EDITOR: Teller J, Billen R, Cutting-Decelle A-F

Nikhil Kaza
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC, USA
nkaza@unc.edu

Donovan Finn
University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, IL, USA
dfinn@illinois.edu

Lewis D. Hopkins
University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, IL, USA
ldhopkin@illinois.edu

SUMMARY:Plans provide information about how multiple decisions are structured over time, and what the intentions of a particular actor are. As and when these decisions get made, or not made, some parts of plans become irrelevant, while some other new relationships are discovered and considered. Recognising this provides a useful way to interpret the changes in plans by tracking the decisions and vice versa. In this paper, we illustrate the complexities of an ontology of urban systems which are needed to ensure the currency of plans, so that they could be effectively used in urban decision making. Especially, when actors are numerous, jurisdictions overlap, actions are interdependent and interests are unstable, this framework enables us to think about plans in a complex and changing urban environment and make them so that they remain useful.

KEYWORDS: Plans, Ontology, Decision Sequences

FULL TEXT: file.pdf (540,641 bytes)

CITATION:

Kaza N, Finn D, Hopkins L D (2010) Updating plans: a historiography of decisions over time, ITcon Vol. 15, Special Issue Bringing urban ontologies into practice , pg. 159-168, http://www.itcon.org/2010/13