Semantic Analysis and 3D Generation of Buildings and Cities

The Urban Ontology implementation of buildings and cities, say the urban fabric, is described as a structured formal knowledge composed of both (1) a group of elemental portions of urban fabric, defined urban elements, and (2) a set of relations between those urban elements. Afterwards we present the UrbanGen system that interprets the Ontology to generate portions of urban fabric. The software allows the user to vary some urban elements or relations, and to verify new urban fabrics that are generated; at this point of the process, the phase of verification of the method and the phase of design overlap. In order to highlight the potential of the method used, and to verify the correctness of the determination of the body of knowledge, we set up the inverse exercise of the construction of urban fabrics through the use of UrbanGen. To this aim, we analyse some existing urban fabrics, and deconstruct them, reducing them to individual urban elements and relations that bind them. UrbanGen introduces and uses the urban template to model the requirements and the options of projects. An application to generate and evaluate design alternatives for an eco-industrial park is presented and discussed.