The International Seminar on Ontology Concepts and Definitions in International Standards and the Issues for Harmonization was held online on November 19, 2020. Over 40 experts, scholars, and students from 7 countries participated this event to discuss topics such as the harmonization of ontologies and terminologies, and the challenges, opportunities and countermeasures for its application in smart cities. The seminar consisted of two sessions, the first of which was chaired by Dr. An Xiaomi from our school and the convener of the Terminology Working Group (WG1) of IEC SYC Smart Cities.

Six experts were invited to give speeches, including three professors from our school giving their speeches in the second session of the event.

Dr. An Xiaomi gave a speech entitled “Definitions and Concepts of Ontology: Towards a Harmonized Concept System.” She analyzed 22 definitions of ontology from international standards and research literature, from which she summarized six kinds of conceptual relationships used in ontologies. These could be important sources for for the construction of future ontological systems. She used the existing ontology standards of SC to carry out mapping and demonstrated the feasibility and future research agenda related to this topic.

Dr. Jia Junzhi gave a speech entitled “Transformation from Term to Concept: Combining with Ontology.” She stated that the construction of SC ontologies requires the integration and collaboration of cross-domain ontologies and terminologies. Terminologies provide the resources for ontology constructions, and the integration of terminologies and ontologies could promote the development of ontological applications. As the key of ontologies, how to extract concepts from terms and construct a conceptual classification system based on terms have practical significances for the cooperation between terminologies and ontologies.

Dr. Ren Ming gave her speech titled “Development and Evaluation of Ontology for Emergency Management in Urban Waterlogging.” Taking the ontology application project she is undertaking as an example, she shared the research progresses of the development and evaluation of the urban waterlogging emergency management ontology. She stressed that the collection, management and analysis of heterogeneous data from different sources based on the ontology model was conducive to the sustainable knowledge management and intelligent decision making in urban waterlogging disasters. She also shared various arguments on the quality assessment of ontologies and personal experiences she gained form this project.