Tunnels in an ontological perspective M. Cristani Dipartimento di Informatica, Universit` a di Verona strada Le Grazie 15, Verona cristani@sci.univr.it C.E. Majorana, V. Salomoni Dipartimento di Costruzioni e Trasporti, Universit` a di Padova via Marzolo, 9 Padova {majorana,salomoni}@caronte.dic.unipd.it In this paper we shall illustrates one of the core parts of the ontological layer of an application, which is under development [1], whose purpose is to support upgrading of long tunnels. This application will be an ontology-driven web decision support system. The reasons for supporting this process in such a semi-automatic way are many: • The aspects that have to be considered when applying an upgrade proce- dure are so many that in practice it is impossible to manage them without an automated support; • The number of involved experts is high, and they usually do not speak the same technical language, and often do not speak the same natural language as well, therefore we need a support for a a unified model of knowledge, that will necessarily be a web-based one, due to the geographic spread of experts; • It is not possible to share data of di↵erent experts without a direct support of unified processing service. Many of the processing utilities presently employed or under development have proprietary input and output data formats, forcing therefore the experts to transfer data to each other either through complex semi-automated translation processes or by means of human understanding, often supported by printed data sheets. In this paper we illustrate the conceptual organisation of data describing tunnels. This describes a tunnel as an object in a model of knowledge developed in OWL, deployed by means of an Ontology Editor. We used Protege-2000, that is an open source system. The top-level of this ontological model is described in Figure 1. The aspects included in this description are fundamentally five: the func- tional and prescriptive requirements of tunnels, the tunnel safety features, the tunnel structure and geometry, the data description of Mass-Heat Flow analysis, the notion of documents to be deployed in the IntelliTun application. 1