Integrating ideals and urban datasets for sustainable city monitoring

This study highlights the potential of connecting ideals and semantic web technology to overcome challenges in urban sustainability monitoring. City governments generally employ abstract concepts to communicate sustainability goals. Moreover, siloed monitoring systems are often used to track a multitude of metrics and indicators. However, the absence of an overarching strategy in cities’ monitoring frameworks and the incompatibility between various datasets and indicators can result in fragmented approaches. By using “Ideals”, actors can collaborate to achieve important objectives and share a unified understanding of the concepts employed. The authors propose the use of ideals to bridge different disciplines and achieve comprehensive insights through indicator-based monitoring systems. The City of Amsterdam is used as an exploratory case study to demonstrate how a domain ontology that combines the examination of coalition agreements, urban datasets, and monitoring systems can provide insights into how a city operationalizes and monitors its own interpretation of sustainable development.