Bypassing Data Unavailability in urban Systems Modeling

Modelers of urban systems are confronted with an enormous complexity, plurality, and multidisciplinarity of the components these urban systems are made of. Despite the existence of a large variety of modeling approaches and techniques- primarily trying to simplify the apparent complexity-data unavailability presents a common factor for partial failure or unsatisfactory results. Improving the situation can only be achieved by increasing the availability of data to feed the model. The present article describes the combination of different modeling techniques, specifically semantic modeling and the use of ontologies to overcome data unavailability when modeling complex urban systems. The first part of the article explains how to describe the semantics of urban systems; the second part describes how to use these semantics to integrate different data sources and heterogeneous models. Thus, this article presents a possibility to model a complex urban system by getting the most out of the available data. The approach is tested through its application in modeling an urban system for energy planning support purposes.