VUMO: Towards an Ontology of Urban Mobility Events for Supporting Semi-Automatic Visualization Tools

Abstract

This paper introduces VUMO, a visualization-oriented ontology that formalizes the knowledge about urban mobility events (e.g. ridership and travel intentions) and visualization techniques. It focuses on serving as a foundation for the development of semi-automatic visualization tools, while also facilitating the process of data integration. The ontology allows techniques to be characterized with human perception factors, so they can be considered when automatically infering recommended techniques for a dataset. The ultimate goal is to benefit transportation decision makers and foster the development of semantically rich visualization techniques. We propose a structured visualization workflow based on VUMO, and apply it to the development of a prototype featuring real data extracted from a journey planner mobile application.