Towards an Ontology for Smart City Competences

Abstract

Smart cities are complex ecosystems that use information and communication technologies for helping their citizens and organizations to face the challenges of urbanization, safety, resilience, and sustainability. The SmartDevOps project proposes a framework aiming to address the shortage of professional skills in municipalities. Following the increased use of AI methods to provide recommendations in training, there is also an increased need for formalization of existing courses to enable recommendations. This work is dedicated to the conceptual formal modeling of the delivered courses for gaining the competences required for smart city professionals by following the SmartDevOps methodology. We present the Smart City Competence Ontology (SCCompO) that provides a formalism for modeling concepts like competence, learning objective and outcome of courses that aims to cooperate with MOOC platform for training of Smart City professionals. It follows the modular, extensible structure of the curriculum, and it is designed to respond to questions regarding prerequisites and outcomes of job profiles, competences, and courses. The impact of using the developed ontology is to augment the MOOC platform by providing reasoning on course selection and their learning outcomes as well on the relations among these concepts in order to make decisions about the learners' curricula. © 2021 ACM.