Festivalization of the City Support: A Case Study

Supporting festivalization involves the analysis of events and crowd taking part in them. The definitions of ''events'' and ''crowds'' are still representing a controversial issue that has been tackled by different disciplines like Sociology, Philosophy and Computer Science. We have recently developed an ontology of events taking advantage of results and perspectives already present in literature and in available resources like DBpedia. The main innovation of our approach is the integration of an ontology of events with an ontology of crowds (developed with reference to Canetti's theory). Starting from a conceptual framework a complete ontology has been implemented in Protègè to create a versatile tool to profile crowds taking part in big events. This paper mainly focuses on a real case study of event, a rock concert, with the aim to support all the people involved (i.e. organizers, security and audience) in configuring similar situations. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.