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Local administrations generate large quantities of data due to the processes followed to attend administrative governance issues and the needs of its citizenry. Sadly, in most cases this data is not fully exploited and remains within the institutions, making their reutilization very difficult. Currently, open data initiatives have gained ground worldwide and more cities are taking advantage of adopting an open data strategy, which are visible at the organizational level and at user level. In this respect, there is a need to generate guidelines that allow cities: (a) to identify datasets to be shared, for example pollution, commercial premises, public services, etc. and (b) to publish quality data on their portals. Data should be accurate and interoperable among cities to facilitate reuse. This work describes the development process of an ontology to represent the acoustic pollution data collected by measurement stations located in cities, providing a common model for data publication. The developed ontology reuses several well-known ontologies and includes classes, properties and instances specifically created to cover this domain. This work also includes real examples about how to instantiate the ontology.

Ontologies are widely used nowadays for many different purposes and in many different contexts, like industry and research, and in domains ranging from geosciences, biology, chemistry or medicine. When used for research, ontologies should be treated as other research artefacts, such as data, software, methods, etc.; following the same principles used to make them findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) to others. However, in comparison to the number of guides, indicators and recommendations available for making research data FAIR, not much attention has been paid so far on how to publish ontologies following the FAIR principles. This position paper reviews the technical and social needs required to define a roadmap for generating and publishing FAIR ontologies on the Web. We analyze four initiatives for ontology publication, aligning them in a common framework for comparison. The paper concludes by opening a discussion about existing, ongoing and required initiatives and instruments to facilitate FAIR ontology sharing on the Web.

Existing smart city ontologies allow representing different types of city-related data from cities. They have been developed according to different ontological commitments and hence do not share a minimum core model that would facilitate interoperability among smart city information systems. In this work, a survey has been carried out in order to study available smart city ontologies and to identify the domains they are representing. Taking into account the findings of the survey and a set of ontological requirements for smart city data, a list of ontology design patterns is proposed. These patterns aim to be easily replicated and provide a minimum set of core concepts in order to guide the development of smart city ontologies.