An ontology-based approach for harmonizing metrics in bike network evaluations

The urgency to decarbonize the transportation sector has accelerated the adoption of micro-mobility solutions, with cycling network development witnessing remarkable growth.Robust and quantitative evaluation frameworks are needed to evaluate the quality of such developments.While a plethora of bike network evaluation approaches exist, their diversity creates issues of interpretability and comparability due to varying metrics and domain-specific terms.We present three contributions to address these challenges.First, we construct a formal ontology, VeloNEMO, that captures key attributes of evaluation metrics for harmonizing bike network evaluation metrics.Second, we generate a machine-readable knowledge base containing these metrics, enabling metaanalyses and resolving some of the existing terminological discrepancies.Third, we propose recommendations for transparent and comparable metric descriptions across various evaluation approaches, illustrated by exploratory metric selection scenarios for a forthcoming bike network evaluation tool.In summary, our research addresses the need for a structured and shared vocabulary for bike network evaluations.This ontology-based approach aims to improve the coherence of evaluation methods as the field of bike network planning continues to evolve, ultimately supporting decision-making for sustainable transportation planning.