An Ontological Approach to Analysing Social Service Provisioning

TL;DR

This paper presents an ontological framework for evaluating and managing social service coverage in Smart Cities, focusing on stakeholder perspectives and extending existing standards.

Contribution

It introduces the Compass ontology, extending the Common Impact Data Standard with new concepts for social service analysis in urban environments.

Findings

Ontology effectively models social service concepts

SPARQL queries demonstrate practical applicability

Supports stakeholder decision-making processes

Abstract

This paper introduces ontological concepts required to evaluate and manage the coverage of social services in a Smart City context. Here, we focus on the perspective of key stakeholders, namely social purpose organizations and the clients they serve. The Compass ontology presented here extends the Common Impact Data Standard by introducing new concepts related to key dimensions: the who (Stakeholder), the what (Need, Need Satisfier, Outcome), the how (Service, Event), and the contributions (tracking resources). The paper first introduces key stakeholders, services, outcomes, events, needs and need satisfiers, along with their definitions. Second, a subset of competency questions are presented to illustrate the types of questions key stakeholders have posed. Third, the extension's ability to answer questions is evaluated by presenting SPARQL queries executed on a Compass-based knowledge graph and analysing their results.