Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present the development of an ontological model consisting of terms and relationships between these terms, creating a conceptual information model for the Built Cultural Heritage (BCH) domain, more specifically for preventive conservation. Design/methodology/approach: The On-To-Knowledge methodology was applied in the ontology development process. Terms related to preventive conservation were identified by means of a taxonomy which was used later to identify related existing ontologies. Three ontologies were identified and merged, i.e. Geneva City Geographic Markup Language (Geneva CityGML), Monument Damage ontology (Mondis) and CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CIDOC-CRM). Additional classes and properties were defined as to provide a complete semantic framework for management of BCH. Findings: A BCH-ontology for preventive conservation was created. It consists of 143 classes from which 38 originate from the Mondis ontology, 38 from Geneva CityGML, 37 from CIDOC-CRM and 30 were newly created. The ontology was applied in a use case related to the New cathedral in the city of Cuenca, Ecuador. Advantages over other type of systems and for the BCH-domain were discussed based on this example. Research limitations/implications: The proposed ontology is in a testing stage through which a number of its aspects are being verified. Originality/value: This ontological model is the first one to focus on the preventive conservation of BCH.

Scientists as well as the general public remember the terrorist attacks that took place in Brussels in March 2016. This was not a stand-alone event since other places were hit previously. This changes people’s perception of places – in tourism terms, destinations - and may affect tourists’ behavior.In this paper, we explore the effects on two levels. First we compare, for 2015 and 2016, the month-by-month evolution of the number of (international) arrivals, overnight stays and hotels’ occupancy rates which tend to respond very quickly, affected by tourists staying away. It is much more difficult to detect changes of feelings and attitude among tourists. We explored the latter via a survey in Brussels and also in Antwerp and Bruges as a kind of benchmark.The results represent bad and good news for the tourism industry in Brussels and Belgium and for Brussels/Belgium as a destination. The bad news is that terrorist attacks did not pass unnoticed. On the contrary, they had an effect on the visitors’ behavior in terms of arrivals and overnight stays (with effects on e.g. hotel occupancy) for several months. We see that the effects are felt far beyond the place that suffered from the attack(s), particularly if this place is a brand for the region or for the country. The good news is that tourists, after ca. six months, seem to feel safe again. Therefore, our results are in line with the international literature but our attention is drawn towards the fact that some did adapt their behavior by self-moderation and by avoiding certain places from a safety perspective as well as differences among countries of origin.

Belgium is a geographically small country bordered by The Netherlands, France, Germany, and Luxembourg, with intense transborder mobility, defined as mobility in the border regions with neighboring countries. It is therefore of interest to examine how the 14-day COVID-19 confirmed case incidence in the border regions is influenced by that of the adjacent regions in the neighboring countries and thus, whether and how it differs from that in the adjacent non-border regions within Belgium. To this end, the 14-day COVID-19 confirmed case incidence is studied at the level of Belgian provinces, well-defined border areas within Belgium, and adjacent regions in the neighboring countries. Auxiliary information encompasses work-related border traffic, travel rates, the proportion of people with a different nationality, the stringency index of the non-pharmaceutical interventions, and the degree of urbanization at the level of the municipality. Especially in transnational urbanized areas such as between the Belgian and Dutch provinces of Limburg and between the Belgian province of Antwerp and the Dutch province of North Brabant, the impact on incidence is visible, at least at some points in time, especially when the national incidences differ between neighboring countries. In contrast, the intra-Belgian language border regions show very little transborder impact on the incidence curves, except around the Brussels capital region, leading to various periods where the incidences are very different in the Dutch-speaking north and the French-speaking south of Belgium. Our findings suggest that while travel restrictions may be needed at some points during a pandemic, a more fine-grained approach than merely closing national borders may be considered. At the same time, in border regions with considerable transborder mobility, it is recommended to coordinate the non-pharmaceutical interventions between the authorities of the various countries overlapping with the border region. While this seems logical, there are clear counterexamples, e.g., where non-essential shops, restaurants, and bars are closed in one country but not in the neighboring country.

To limit additional (net) land take for economic activities, the reality of space use needs to be properly understood. This was assessed by comparing the spatial patterns obtained from a field inventory with those from existing data for five case areas in Flanders (Belgium). Each case area is a transect from a high-density urban area to a suburban neighborhood or even a semi-rural zone. The statistics on these areas, based on official data, mostly derived from tax returns, social security contributions, and on commercial retail data, were checked with field observations. The location of economic activities and the patterns of space use vary in different settlement environments, resulting in the identification of typical characteristics for eight location environment types. While in, for example, core shopping centers a strong convergence can be noticed between existing statistics and the field inventory (71% of companies and 93% of parcels are detected on the field), in residential areas (21% of companies and 17% of parcels are detected on the field) the convergence is very limited. In other words, in some environments, (the combination of) data and statistics give a good understanding of the space use while, in other environments, gaps with realities in the field are obvious. Therefore, a field inventory system can enrich the picture and present another reality to complement both existing statistics and other land-use data methods such as remote sensing and web data extraction.

Data-driven domains such as public administration, health or mobility have adopted a so-called ‘data ecosystem’ perspective to unify the socio-technical aspects fostering data-driven collaboration. While a data ecosystem is technically able to collect and merge their different datasets, it is yet relatively unable to facilitate meaningful forms of collaboration between actors. Based on previous research on value creation in data ecosystems, we hypothesize that this inability is mainly due to ecosystems not reflecting actor values, i.e. aspects which are important and imply a desirable behavior, often related to goals, objectives, motivations and decision making. This paper therefore proposes a reflective approach to reveal the values in data-driven collaboration by answering the following research questions: What role do values play in the process of developing a data ecosystem? And how can value-led participatory design support data-driven collaboration? We attempt to answer these questions through an exploratory study based on 5 interviews with consortium members of a garden data ecosystem currently in development around a citizen science initiative in Flanders, Belgium. We discovered that the explicit use of values and frictions has the potential to augment the collaboration between actors. This approach can thus be useful to future practitioners who aim to expand the societal impact of their work.