“Sensing” the “City Model” to improve effectiveness of digital resources

The current way of handling knowledge, based on ICT, has reached a high level of performance in using digital information and managing digital archives. Nevertheless, there are still a lot of unexpressed potentialities in the way of storing, retrieving and using knowledge also in combination with non-digital information. These potentialities are even more relevant in the field of urban and territorial data where there are still lots of innovative technologies that can be used when managing digital information related to the city and if combined with the big challenge represented by the new concept of “smart cities”. This article illustrates one of these potentialities: the use of semiotic taxonomy concepts to increase the effectiveness of data that are related to a digital representation of the city we call City Model. The purpose of this article is to foster the joint activity of institutional offices with web users towards the goal of creating a new, structured, semantically interconnected, shared and open knowledge resource based on a substrate of information that represents the physical environment.